My broader statistical analysis reinforces this basic pattern. The New Urban Crisis Index is positively and significantly correlated with the size and density of metros, their concentrations of high-tech industry, their shares of creative-class workers and college graduates, and their levels of economic output, income, and wages. The New Urban Crisis also closely follows America’s political divide, being positively and significantly associated with the share of votes for Clinton in 2016 and negatively associated with the share of Trump votes. Once again, we see that the New Urban Crisis is a fundamental feature of larger, denser, richer, more liberal, more educated, more high-tech, and more creative-class metro areas.2
Figure 10.1: The New Urban Crisis Index
Source: Martin Prosperity Institute, based on data from the US Census and the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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All three—Trump, Ford, and Brexit—reflect the deepening fault lines of class and location that define and divide us today.
These political cleavages ultimately stem from the far deeper economic and geographic structures of the New Urban Crisis. They are the product of our new age of winner-take-all urbanism, in which the talented and the advantaged cluster and colonize a small, select group of superstar cities, leaving everybody and everywhere else behind. Much more than a crisis of cities, the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time.
This book is my attempt to grapple with the New Urban Crisis and the deep contradictions of our cities and our society writ large. In writing it, I have three primary objectives: to spell out the key dimensions of this crisis; to identify the fundamental forces that are shaping it; and to outline what we need to do to bring about a new and more inclusive urbanism that encourages innovation and wealth creation while generating good jobs, rising living standards, and a better way of life for all.

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By limiting density and clustering, NIMBYs hold back the urban innovation that powers growth. That’s why I prefer to call them the New Urban Luddites instead of NIMBYs, which sounds more benign. The original Luddites, named after their semi-mythical leader, Ned Ludd, took hammers to the weaving machines that were taking away their livelihoods during England’s Industrial Revolution.23 Over the course of the next century, ironically, those factories would lift living standards to higher levels than the Luddites could have ever imagined. The original Luddites, at least, were poor. The New Urban Luddites aren’t exploited workers, but some of the biggest winners of winner-take-all urbanism.
This New Urban Luddism is codified in the enormous and complex thicket of zoning laws and other land use regulations that restrict the supply of housing in many cities.

Others say they aren’t solving the problems posed by the suburbs because they build on large plots often in the middle of nowhere, which has led to the nickname “New Suburbanism” (one blogger described New Urbanism as a “pretty veil over common suburbia”). New Urbanism communities can be expensive to build and their homes expensive to buy. Getting over conventional zoning codes is often problematic and requires lots of patience, and often compromise: FHA loan rules still limit the percentage of commercial real estate in vertical apartment units, making it hard for New Urbanism developers to secure financing for the mixed-use buildings they say are a critical ingredient in their neighborhoods.
Nevertheless, New Urbanism principles have been followed and copied over the years. In 1996, Disney opened Celebration, Florida, its five-thousand-acre master-planned community near Orlando, largely on New Urbanism principles, though it did not bill it a New Urbanist community.

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During the conference’s main stage sessions, Le Corbusier, the French pioneer of modernist architecture who envisioned a high-rise city, is invoked as many times as the movement’s enemy as Jane Jacobs is as their hero.
The main principles of New Urbanism have not changed much since its founding twenty years ago. New Urbanism is not a rating or rule book like, say, LEED, the third-party green building accreditation that requires structures adhere to a set of specific standards to earn its label; rather, it’s a set of basic principles and guidelines—a sort of neighborhood DNA code—for developers, planners, designers, and policy makers who wish to design neighborhoods based on traditional town planning methods. Most New Urbanism developments have certain identifying characteristics: narrower or more “modest-sized” streets, an easily identifiable town center, a Main Street lined with buildings that mix commercial and residential spaces, and a mixture of housing types throughout the rest of the neighborhood—single-family detached houses, attached town houses, and apartments—all commingled together.

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Most New Urbanism developments have certain identifying characteristics: narrower or more “modest-sized” streets, an easily identifiable town center, a Main Street lined with buildings that mix commercial and residential spaces, and a mixture of housing types throughout the rest of the neighborhood—single-family detached houses, attached town houses, and apartments—all commingled together. New Urbanism is not architecture; New Urbanists are almost agnostic to what the houses’ exteriors look like, or even to the architectural style of the neighborhood. In the same way Clarence Perry, whose neighborhood unit helped transform suburban design, had nothing to do with the design of homes in those neighborhoods, New Urbanism theories relate primarily to a community’s bones, or the design and layout of the neighborhood itself. As it was with Seaside, the goal of New Urbanism is to create neighborhoods whose design serves a social as well as a physical purpose. The mix of housing stock, for instance, ensures that a wide range of economic classes lives in the same neighborhood (which also makes homes easier to sell, since the housing stock appeals to a broader range of the market), while the pleasing, diverse streetscapes are designed to be both safe for foot traffic and also appealing enough to bring people out of their homes and into the public space.

One obvious neotraditional product is the Mazda Miata, a car that looks, sounds, and handles like a British roadster but maintains the rate-of-repair record of a Honda Civic. The typical neotraditional house, which populates many New Urban neighborhoods, has an airy, freeflowing interior enclosed within a colonial shell.
Neotraditionalism is an apt term to describe the New Urbanism, because the New Urbanism’s intention is to advocate what works best: what pattern of development is the most environmentally sensitive, socially responsible, and economically sustainable. As is often the case, what seems to work best is a historic model—the traditional neighborhood—adapted as necessary to serve the needs of modern man.
The commonsense nature of the New Urbanism bodes well for its future. The fact that it was not invented, but selected and adapted from existing models, dramatically distinguishes it from the concepts of total replacement that preceded it.

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The fact that it was not invented, but selected and adapted from existing models, dramatically distinguishes it from the concepts of total replacement that preceded it. It took many years and many failures for planners and architects to reach this point, but so many new inventions have fared so badly that designers have been forced to put some faith in human experience. Further experience will no doubt modify the precepts and techniques of the New Urbanism, but that is as it should be.
THE CHARTER OF THE NEW URBANISM
INTRODUCTION
The Congress for the New Urbanism views divestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.
We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.

Homogenized, banal “icon architecture“ (also known as “cookie cutter” or “franchise” architecture), which immediately conveys a corporate image to the passerby—McDonald’s golden arches, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s red-and-white stripes—diminishes a city’s unique identity and creates what Jim Kunstler calls the “geography of nowhere.”37
A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING
We should be on guard not to allow projects touted as New Urbanist that deliver New Urbanism‘s principles only in a skin-deep way, such as those that perpetuate car dependence, or that fail to provide a mix of housing affordability, even if the houses have front porches or other forms of window dressing.
NEW URBANISM AND THE POOR
I am always astounded when people attack New Urbanism as elitist and not in the best interests of poor people.
It seems as obvious to me that an auto-dominated community is as detrimental to poor people as it seems obvious that community designrecommended by New Urbanism reduces the need for car travel and is beneficial. New Urbanism seems to be the best chance to reduce car dependency through urban design, which is an important reason why I am so enthusiastic about it.

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The most effective, desirable strategy is to establish context-sensitive community regulations that transition from walkable to auto-oriented to rural and wildlife preserve (a concept New Urbanists call a “transect“ system).
For the walkable portion of the community, the leading design paradigm today is the New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a set of development practices that creates more people-oriented communities—attractive, efficient, sociable, and pedestrian friendly—at the same time that it significantly reduces car dependence. According to Duany, a leader in this design strategy: “Since its founding in 1992, New Urbanism has been the antithesis of sprawl, because it designs communities that are balanced in function; creates inclusive housing; supports home-based business; spa-tially defines the public realm; facilitates pedestrian accessibility; minimizes use of the car; supports transit; and builds on infill [in-town] as well as greenfield [newly developed] sites.”1ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL: THE TRANSECT
SYSTEM
You can choose any color you want, Henry Ford notably told early car buyers, as long as it is black.

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I would resign myself, along with everyone else, to increasingly unlivable communities, more time trapped in my car on the road, more frustration and isolation, more inescapable congestion, until the economic and social and emotional costs of being car dependent became unbearable for a critical mass of people. Twenty more years? Fifty?
But there is hope. An important subcategory of smart growth is the
“New Urbanism,” a strategy of community and neighborhood design that uses timeless, traditional development principles at the same time it incorporates contemporary technology and values; the pedestrian, not the car, is the design imperative (see chapters 9 and 10).
As Marvin Harris pointed out in Cultural Materialism (1979), it is not ideas that determine our behavior and values, but the environmental and economic conditions we must cope with each day.

Its best-known, iconic projects, such
as Seaside, Florida; Kentlands, Maryland; and Stapleton, Colorado,7 are
second-home or bedroom communities (neighborhood-serving) that may
or may not become regional-serving someday. “TND” as a term tends to
be interchangeable with “New Urbanism” and focuses on neighborhoodserving places.
New Urbanism and TNDs have played pivotal roles in the rebirth of
neighborhood-serving places in suburban greenfields. Use of this type of
development has demonstrated that walkable neighborhood demand can
be built from scratch. Andres Duany, one of the founders of the Congress of
the New Urbanism and a leading thinker and architect, has justified New
Urbanism suburban development by saying that most future development
will go to the suburban greenfield sites, so they might as well be walkable.
THE FIVE KINDS OF REGIONAL- SERVING
WALKABLE URBAN PLACES
Based upon my recent experience throughout the country, there appear
to be five kinds of regional-serving walkable urban places in U.S. metropolitan areas as of the mid-2000s.

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Many readers familiar with recent trends in the built environment will
notice that I have not used some terms common over the past fifteen years,
such as “transit-oriented development,” “New Urbanism,” and “traditional
neighborhood development” (TND). The description “transit-oriented development” can and does apply to most regional-serving, walkable urban
places. (It is possible, but not ideal, to be nontransit-served and still create
118 | THE OPTION OF URBANISM
walkable urbanism, as some of the examples below demonstrate). Transitoriented development can occur in any density that supports transit.
In general, New Urbanism has played out on the ground as neighborhood-serving walkable urbanism. Its best-known, iconic projects, such
as Seaside, Florida; Kentlands, Maryland; and Stapleton, Colorado,7 are
second-home or bedroom communities (neighborhood-serving) that may
or may not become regional-serving someday.

This pragmatic focus on street-level performance led the Boston Globe Magazine to dub him in 1994, “the urban mechanic.”44 Unlike cities where the mayor’s tech stars were busy launching apps contests, publishing open data, or running analytics, in Boston the mayor focused them on building tools for citizen engagement. “Technology is not part of our mission,” explained Chris Osgood, a veteran civil servant who previously worked for New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation and who, as Jacob’s cochair, made up the other half of the Office of New Urban Mechanics. “It is to connect people and government better.”
Consider Boston’s approach to the snow problem, as compared to Chicago or New York. Just as those cities were opening up their snowplow maps in January 2012, New Urban Mechanics launched “Adopt-A-Hydrant,” a Web app that allowed neighborhood volunteers to claim local fireplugs as their own winter wards. On top of responding to over five thousand fires each year, the Boston Fire Department is responsible for shoveling out over thirteen thousand hydrants after every major snowstorm.

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You’re talking about weeks versus months.”49 Above all, “Urban Mechanics is an experimental laboratory,” he told me.50
All of these factors—the focus on citizens, the substantial human resources, the severe constraints on project scope, the political reality that Menino doesn’t have to grab headlines with every tech initiative—united to chart a markedly different path for Boston, an almost guerrilla approach to smart-city building. Like the minutemen of the Massachusetts rebellion, the New Urban Mechanics team picked its targets carefully, and struck fast with a tiny force. It’s a point not lost on the team. Jacob saw early on that the contestants in city apps contests were “basically developing solutions for themselves. Which makes sense, right? Because that’s how you scratch your itch.” Boston chose not to follow that path. As Osgood saw it, Menino’s focus on accountability to his constituents dictated a more engaged approach to apps. “Because of our mayor, we take very seriously the responsibility that government has to understand the problems that residents have, and to try and solve those particular problems.” Ensuring that the apps New Urban Mechanics built were both useful to Boston residents and “piloting something interesting and creative” perhaps results in fewer apps, he says, but apps that will be “sustained and evolved and resonate more.”51
Unlike other cities, where technology is seen as the catalyst of change, Menino made technology subservient.

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As Jacob explained to me later, in August 2012 he had taken on a new role advising his peers in several other American cities on how to replicate the success of the Office of New Urban Mechanics. Philadelphia, the first to come knocking “actually called and asked ‘Can we just franchise what you guys do?’ ” Jacob proudly said.53 He was also working to help spread to other cities some of the projects kick-started in Boston. One such tool, Community PlanIt, was an online game designed by Eric Gordon, a visual and media arts professor at Emerson College, to enhance the value of community meetings. When we spoke, Community PlanIt had been successfully rolled out in two of Boston’s suburbs as well as Detroit.
Although it was poised to go viral, can New Urban Mechanics survive a change of leadership at home in Boston? Menino will finally leave office after the 2013 mayoral election, having served a record five terms.

Shanghai, whose growth
was frozen for decades by Maoist policies of deliberate underurbanization, could have as many as 27 million residents in its huge estuarial
metro-region. Mumbai (Bombay), meanwhile, is projected to attain a
population of 33 million, although no one knows whether such gigantic
concentrations of poverty are biologically or ecologically sustainable.10
The exploding cities of the developing world are also weaving
extraordinary new urban networks, corridors, and hierarchies. In the
Americas, geographers already talk about a leviathan known as the
Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region (RSPER) which
includes the medium-sized cities on the 500-kilometer-long transport
axis between Brazil's two largest metropolises, as well as the important
industrial area dominated by Campinas; with a current population of
37 million, this embryonic megalopolis is already larger than TokyoYokohama.11 Likewise, the giant amoeba of Mexico City, already
having consumed Toluca, is extending pseudopods that will eventually
incorporate much of central Mexico, including the cities of Cuernavaca,
Puebla, Cuautla, Pachuca, and Queretaro, into a single megalopolis
with a mid-twenty-first-century population of approximately 50 million
— about 40 percent of the national total.12
Even more surprising is the vast West African conurbation rapidly
coalescing along the Gulf of Guinea with Lagos (23 million people by
9 UN-HABITAT Urban Indicators Database (2002).
10 Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia 1998 Yearbook, p. 63.
11 Hamilton Tolosa, "The Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region: A
Quest for Global Integration," The Annals of "Regonal Science 31:2 (September 2003),
pp. 480, 485.
12 Gustavo Garza, "Global Economy, Metropolitan Dynamics and Urban
Policies in Mexico," Cities 16:3 (1999), p. 154.
2015 according to one estimate) as its fulcrum.

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continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West
Java."17 As it takes shape over the next century, this great dragon-lice
sprawl of cities will constitute the physical and demographic culmination of millennia of urban evolution. The ascendency of coastal East
Asia, in turn, will surely promote a Tokyo—Shanghai "world city"
dipole to equality with the New York—London axis in the control of
global flows of capital and information.
The price of this new urban order, however, will be increasing
inequality within and between cities of different sizes and econo ic
specializations. Chinese experts, indeed, are currently debating whether
the ancient income-and-development chasm between city and count yside is now being replaced by an equally fundamental gap between
small, particularly inland cities and the giant coastal metropolises.18
However, the smaller cities are precisely where most of Asia will soon
live.

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Before the Second World War, most poor
urban Latin Americans lived in inner-city rental housing, but in the late
1940s import-substitution industrialization spurred a dramatic wave of
squatter invasion on the outskirts of Mexico City and other Latin
American cities. In response to the burgeoning of shantytowns,
authorities in several countries, ardently supported by the urban middle
classes, launched massive crackdowns on informal settlement. Since
many of the new urban immigrants were indigenistas or descendants of
slaves, there was often a racial dimension to this "war on squatting."
The postwar dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Perez Jimenez, was a
particularly notorious enemy of informal housing. According to three
UCLA authors: "[His] government's solution to the fem'wwas the bulldozer. On a given morning, policemen and trucks would arrive at the
barrio-, an official would direct the loading of the residents' belongings
onto the truck; policemen would deal with any objections; when the
belongings and the residents had been removed to the new apartments,
12 Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State
and the Logc of the Market, Berkeley 1999, pp. 2, 41.
13 Table 1, Fabre, "La Chine," p. 196.

Many public officials and planning professionals were first introduced to the principles of New Urbanism through the vehicle of lectures and slide shows documenting the ugliness of suburban sprawl and the intelligence of urban design as practiced in many places in the preautomobile era. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe, and a handful of coconspirators carried these slides to countless audiences all over the country in the early and mid-1990s. As a model of their intentions, they offered Seaside, the residential community in north Florida that was designed by Duany and Plater-Zyberk in the 1980s, complete with sidewalks, front porches, a town square, and a whole array of other reminders of the old-fashioned, pedestrian-friendly American small town.
The first half of the 1990s brought the New Urbanism a reputation and a following far beyond what its founders could have predicted.

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This does not make newly wealthy inner-city neighborhoods unattractive, but it is a limitation they must face and a problem that no city has fully solved.
Finally, we have learned from both the Financial District and Bushwick (as we did from Sheffield) that the relative importance of travel time compared to other commodities is increasing as the years go by. To repeat the succinct aphorism of the Bushwick real estate broker, “These days, convenience trumps aesthetics.” This is likely to become even more important as a new urban generation emerges. It is an idea we will continue to pursue in the remaining chapters of the book.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEW SUBURBIA
IT MAY SEEM FAR-FETCHED to compare the Hispanic construction workers of modern suburban Atlanta to the peasants from southern France who built Baron Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards. But it reinforces an important point about the ways in which the American suburbs of the present mirror the European suburbs of 150 years ago: They are, in large part, the gateways to which newcomers come from far away to perform the entry-level work the society wishes to have performed.

…

They will need to have transit stations integrated into the very fabric of the developments. Whether this is possible, I don’t know. The suburban retrofits are, despite the number of examples that multiply every year, in only the earliest stages.
But if urbanized suburbia is going to be the answer for this generation, or even a large part of it, density—somewhere—is the only real choice.
DENSITY HAS BEEN, in many ways, the principal theme of New Urbanism, the movement that is now two decades old and has had a profound if not quite revolutionary impact on the shape of cities all over the Western world. In 1990, the New Urbanists were a small, close-knit coterie of architects and planners with a simple and heretical message: The automobile, and four decades of building homes, streets, and suburbs for the automobile’s convenience, had drained American places of the community and intimacy that human beings naturally desire.

Until recently, he believed they would be the engine rooms of the new economy, embracing the diversity necessary to attract talent. That has certainly happened. Gay pride parades seem to get larger every year. A thousand multicultural flowers are blooming. Yet in squeezing out income diversity, the new urban economies are also shutting off the scope for serendipity. The West’s global cities are like tropical islands surrounded by oceans of resentment. Florida’s latest book is called The New Urban Crisis. Rather than being shaped by those who live there full-time, the characters of our biggest cities are increasingly driven by the global super-rich as a place to park their money. Many of the creative classes are being edged out. Urban downtowns have turned into ‘deadened trophy districts’. New York’s once-bohemian SoHo is now better known for its high-end boutiques than its artists’ studios.

The carefully crafted project of the winning team is representative of a current approach to urban design that has been termed neo-traditional but whose adherents prefer to call it New Urbanism. New Urbanism represents a turning away from the principles that have characterized American urban design since the 1950s and a rediscovery of the virtues of traditional, gridded streets scaled to the pedestrian and of cities that integrate a diversity of urban uses—commercial and industrial as well as residential—rather than being zoned according to single functions. So far, the accomplishments of architects and planners like Peter Calthorpe, Daniel Solomon, and Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have been predominantly suburban and aimed at an upper-middle-class clientele, but the commercial successes of New Urbanism are evidence of its broad appeal to consumers and developers alike. It seems appropriate that such a mainstream, pragmatic approach should be applied to the remedial design of public housing.

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Likewise small-to-midsize regional centers that share several characteristics other than their size. They score high in that ephemeral but crucial category, “quality of life.” They are near recreational amenities like lakes and mountains. They have strong local economies and have lower unemployment, poverty, and crime rates than the national average. But Raleigh-Durham, Rochester, and Provo-Orem are not merely examples of successful small cities. They are also examples of a new urban trend: the rise of what might be called the college city.
The college town is an American institution. Throughout the nineteenth century, it was common practice to locate private colleges in small towns like Amherst in Massachusetts, Middlebury in Vermont, and Claremont in California. The idea was that bucolic surroundings would provide the appropriate atmosphere for the pursuit of learning and (not incidentally) remove students from the distractions and temptations of the big city.

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It is estimated that in New York City, for example, tourism supports more than 280,000 jobs, which is only slightly fewer than the important finance, insurance, and real estate sectors. In London, about 200,000 are employed in the tourism sector. It is true that these service jobs are not as highly paid as those in the financial sector, but the low level of skill they demand makes them useful entry-level positions for immigrants and other new urban arrivals.
Unlike traditional industry, the hospitality industry doesn’t make anything. But if it doesn’t export goods, it does import people—lots of them. And just as the smokestack industries of the past belched soot into the atmosphere and altered their urban surroundings, present-day hospitality industries also change the city—and not always for the better. The story of the neighborhood restaurant that was ruined by tourists is universal.

Mollenkopf and Sonenshein, “The New Urban Politics of Integration,” in
Bringing Outsiders In, 75.
Patricia Pessar and Pamela Graham, “Dominicans: Transnational Identities
and Local Politics,” in New Immigrants in New York, ed. Nancy Foster (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 264.
Mollenkopf and Sonenshein, “The New Urban Politics of Integration,” in
Bringing Outsiders In, 76.
Ibid.
While isolated examples of Black councillors elected in Los Angeles can
be traced back to 1915, a consistent pattern of Blacks elected councillors
started after 1965. John H. Laslett, “Historical Perspectives: Immigration
and the Rise of a Distinctive Urban Region, 1900–1970,” in Ethnic Los
Angeles, ed. Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1996), 68.
Mollenkopf and Sonenshein, “The New Urban Politics of Integration,” in
Bringing Outsiders In, 75.

…

John Mollenkopf and Raphael Sonenshein, “The New Urban Politics of
Integration: A View from the Gateway Cities,” in Bringing Outsiders In,
ed. Jennifer Hochschild and John Mollenkopf (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2009), 74–93.
Good, “Patterns in Canada’s Immigrant-Receiving Cities,” 267–8.
A narrow view of political incorporation refers only to how an
immigrant or minority group finds a place in a political structure. For a
comprehensive account see Jennifer Hochschild and John Mollenkopf.
“Modeling Immigrant Political Incorporation,” in Bringing Outsiders In, 16.
Jennifer Hochschild and John Mollenkopf, “Understanding Immigrant
Political Incorporation through Comparison,” in Bringing Outsiders In, 303–4.
This paragraph draws on John Mollenkopf and Raphael Sonenshein, “The
New Urban Politics of Integration,” in Bringing Outsiders In, 75–7.

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Even recent theories of urban structure
use these variables as the basis of their models. The technological, economic, and social changes of the late twentieth century have made the
urban structure malleable. Cities have spread out, suburbs have grown
into veritable cities, shopping malls have realigned the commercial
order, and the electronic revolution has drastically diminished the resistance of distance. These changes have realigned the urban structure and
given rise to new urban theories.
The Los Angeles school of urbanism projects Los Angeles as the
model of a post-modern city, lacking a strong centre. It views the city
to be cellular in structure, divided into autonomous places by function,
culture, and location. It envisages the growth impulse to work from
the outside to the central core, reversing the conventional view. The
city is fragmented into functional-sociocultural districts, such as edge cities, ethnoburbs, theme parks, gated communities, corporate citadels,
and command and control centres.4 Such a city has many cores and
is held together by political institutions and infrastructure.

Everyone in the forty-nine houseboats on the dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. Everyone knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.
Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of New Urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Cities Redefined,” an article in the Whole Earth Review. Since then, New Urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design, and regionalism. It drew one of its major ideas from a squatter community.
There are a lot more ideas where that one came from. For instance, shopping areas could be more like the lanes in squatter cities, with a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables.

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It’s a place where your caste doesn’t matter, where a woman can dine alone at a restaurant without harassment, and where you can marry the person of your choice. For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money. It’s also about freedom.
By 2004 I knew something important was up with the rampant urbanization of the developing world, but I couldn’t find much in the way of ground truth about it until the publication of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World, by journalist Robert Neuwirth. His research strategy was to learn the relevant language and then live for months as a slum resident—in Rocinha (one of seven hundred favelas in Rio de Janeiro), in Kibera (a squatter city of 1 million outside Nairobi), in the Sanjay Gandhi Nagar neighborhood of Mumbai, and in Sultanbeyli, a now fully developed squatter city of 300,000 with a seven-story city hall, outside Istanbul.

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Chances are you’ve come across Sausalito waterfront creativity in the writings of Annie Lamott, Alan Watts, Paul Hawken, or Green architect Sim Van Der Ryn; in the cartoons of Shel Silverstein or Phil Frank; in Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”; in the Antenna Theater- produced Audio Tours that guide you around the world’s museums and historic sites; in the biological paintings of Isabella Kirkland; and in any town or city reshaped by what is called New Urbanism. That last item is my example.
• In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organize neighborhood communities, and moved to a houseboat on the end of South Forty Dock, where I live. He found he was in a place that had the densest housing in California, where no one locked their doors—where most of the doors didn’t even have locks. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community.

It was six years ago to the week, he noted absently, as if remembering an old friend’s birthday, that construction on Tellinghuisen’s house had begun.
We got to talking about what made this place tick and, by extension, how one would go about building it anew someplace else. It was something he’d thought about before briefing visting members of Parliament on how they might go about rehabbing Heathrow. “ ‘New Urbanism’ is a funny term, because it’s really the old urbanism,” he said. “Peter [Calthorpe] would tell you you can have New Urbanism anywhere.”
And so would Gleason’s boss, Jon Ratner. The youngest member of the Ratner clan is arguably its most radical. Having started work at Stapleton in his twenties, he’d since risen to the post of director of sustainability, in charge of the firm’s triple bottom line: “people, planet, and profit.” “We’re hoping to use the ingenuity of the private sector and the fiscal resources of the public one to build a new vision for what a city can be,” he told me.

…

After the city agreed to rezone the land, the firm promised to build the downtown Mesa never had, an exercise in “twenty-first-century desert urbanism”—New Urbanism with stucco flourishes. The plan depends on Gateway living up to its name and winning flights from the region’s hub, Phoenix–Sky Harbor. Impressed by their ambitions, The Economist dubbed their aerotropolis the “city of the future” and name-checked John Kasarda as its architect.
We want to live near airports, even if we don’t care to admit it—even to ourselves. Stapleton, Reunion, and the Mesas offer compelling evidence. We flock to them because that’s where the jobs are, next door or at the end of a flight. So how do we build a better aerotropolis than the ones we have now?
One of the best tools in our kit is something called “transit oriented development,” an idea coined by Peter Calthorpe the same year he helped found the Congress for the New Urbanism. The name says it all: neighborhoods and cities built along the splines of public transit.

The notion of urbanism provides a useful perspective for critical study of such
hierarchies.
Third, the New Urbanism school of design is among the most important
movements afoot in our current debate on the future of American city life.72 This
movement harks back to design patterns from what I am calling the urbanist era
(in truth, that is, the old urbanism), and does so for reasons having everything to
do with the desire to recapture urbanism’s power to order and govern social
space humanely and well. New Urbanist designs encourage public interaction,
engagement, and grounded living through features such as open porches, which
look very like features found in abundance in houses from about 1910.
But design alone is apt not to suffice in isolation from other features. The extent to which the New Urbanism’s design strategy can be integrated with cultural, economic, and governmental requirements for success in real city neighborhoods remains largely for the future to decide.

…

This dramatic assertion of City Hall’s authority met with summary rejection in court, and
the strike precipitated the loss of the city’s major remaining industrial base. I
carry a few major strands of economic and social and political change right up to
the present in order to show what is meant by urbanism’s ending.
The third and last resonance of the term “urbanism” attaches to the vibrant recent movement that announced itself as the New Urbanism. Centering especially on the Miami design studio of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,
this movement seeks to recapture the look, feel, and function of a more humane
era. New Urbanist design encourages front porches, carefully rendered sidewalks, and scores of other details that evoke what this movement means by “urxviii
P R E F A C E
banism.” The movement presents the intriguing hope that some of the strengths
I find in the old urbanism may live again.

…

It was, however, a strong signal, as the city’s population share fell from
about 80 percent to just over 60 percent. More ominously, the city’s share of the
regional grand list dropped from almost 85 percent to just over 61 percent.
The suburban architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
is quite often handsome, and the best of it has strong appeal to this day (figures
7.4 and 7.5). At least superficially, it often seems to define the housing ideal of the
New Urbanism.32 The numbing sameness of later tract development is often
avoided, and the appeal to essentially urban sensibilities is very strong.
GROCERY RETAILING, 1913–50
The retail grocery of Frank Rice’s day was remarkable for three reasons: its being grounded in a specific urban neighborhood market, its role as an element of
social organization in even the smallest neighborhoods, and its economic survival in so localized and competitive a setting.

Maybe they cling to religion there.’54 Such a discourse camouflages the way in which the Republican Party has long been dominated by a cabal of billionaires, CEOs, and corporate and military lobbyists who have successfully shaped policy to subsidize their class interests while dramatically undermining services and subsidies for America’s working and lower-middle classes.
VOICES OF THE CITY (JOURNAL)
A flick through the pages of the United States’ leading ‘new urban right’ magazine the City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, intellectual architects of both George W. Bush’s neoconservatism and Giuliani’s right-wing ‘counter-revolution’ in 1990s New York, is telling.55 Celebrations of positive economic, cultural, political or social aspects of metropolitan mixing are absent here. Instead, there are streams of anti-urban invective highlighting the purported failures, threats, pathologies and vulnerabilities of the nation’s central metropolitan areas.

…

Eyal Weizman, for instance, has shown how certain Israeli generals have appropriated the radical, post-structuralist writings of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to fashion new military doctrine for taking and controlling the labyrinthine spaces of Palestinian refugee camps.102 Here, writes Weizman, ‘contemporary urban warfare plays itself out within a constructed, real or imaginary architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization, and subversion of space’.103 By breaking through the linked walls of entire towns and thus creating paths, the Israeli military seeks to ‘create operational “space as if it had no borders”, neutralizing the advantages accorded by urban terrain to opponents of occupation’.104
Many of the new urban-warfare techniques used by state militaries – which Goonewardena and Kipfer label ‘colonization without occupation – are imitations of techniques of urban resistance used against state militaries in earlier centuries. ‘This non-linear, poly-nucleated and anti-hierarchical strategy of combat in urban areas’, they point out, ‘in fact plagiarises the tactics of the defenders of the Paris Commune, Stalingrad and the Kasbahs of Algiers, Jenin and Nablus’.105
Techniques of urban militarism and urbicidal violence serve to discipline or displace dissent and resistance.

He could do this in part because of new building technologies (iron and glass construction, gas lighting and the like) and new forms of organisation (the omnibus companies and the department stores). But he also needed new financial institutions and debt instruments (the Crédit Mobilier and Immobilier). He helped resolve the capital surplus disposal problem in effect by setting up a Keynesian-style system of debt-financed infrastructural urban improvements.
All of this entailed the co-evolution of a new urban way of life and a new kind of urban persona. Paris became ‘the city of light’, the great centre of consumption, tourism and pleasure. The cafés, the department stores (also brilliantly described in another Zola novel, The Ladies’ Paradise (1883)), the fashion industry, the grand expositions, the opera and the spectacle of court life all played their part in creating new profit opportunities through consumerism.

…

Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate (the production of each has become big business), as do fast food and artisanal market places, boutique cultures, coffee shops, and the like. And it is not only in the advanced capitalist countries where this style of urbanisation can be found – you will find it in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Mumbai as well as in almost every Asian city you can think of. Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many parts of the world now gets its antidote through a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community (supposedly intimate and secure as well as often gated) and a supposedly ‘sustainable’ boutique lifestyle as a developer product to fulfil urban dreams.
The impacts on political subjectivity have been huge. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism and financial opportunism has become the template for human personality socialisation.

…

The darker side of surplus absorption through urban transformation entails, however, repeated bouts of urban restructuring through ‘creative destruction’. This highlights the significance of crises as moments of urban restructuring. It has a class dimension since it is usually the poor, the underprivileged and those marginalised from political power that suffer primarily from this process.
Violence is often required to make the new urban geography out of the wreckage of the old. Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation for supposedly public benefit, doing so in the name of civic improvement, environmental restoration and urban renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements, along with insalubrious industries, from Paris’s city centre, where they constituted a threat to public order, public health and, of course, political power.

Neoliberal urban governance is the result of
bundling these related security and development agendas into a coherent governance ideology and related set of practices in which so-called
free markets provide guiding principles and reference points for ordering
urban life.
The situation in Cape Town mirrors that in other prominent cities in
South Africa and beyond. In these cities, distinct interests have converged
to produce a somewhat new urban reality in which pursuit of “world city”
status establishes the basic constraints and possibilities for urban development.7 Cities in many countries have been cut loose from receding social
welfare states—where one existed at all—and have been left to make their
own way, so to speak, in the global economy as part of a neoliberal growth
strategy pioneered in North America in the 1970s, marked by a sharpening
of intercity competition for resources.

…

For those youth who do come into conflict with
the law, either because they have committed a crime or because they are
falsely arrested, the criminal justice system only exposes them to another
round of trauma before they are released. The context in which so many
children are brought into contact with the criminal justice system, or simply confronted with the force of urban security structures, is no longer
racial apartheid, but a form of security governance that is rooted in a new
urban politics, in which the transgressive presence of black youth remains
central. In the next section we look at how neoliberal governance through
urban revitalization of the city’s core contributes to this criminalization of
black youth.
Securing the Core: Street Children and Moral Panic in the Central Business District
The city government of Cape Town has openly endorsed a market-driven
approach to economic growth since at least the mid-1990s, over the
objections of many urban residents and community organizations, and
this commitment exercises a profound influence on urban governance.

…

We can therefore
expect to see continual increases in public and private resources being
channeled into forms of social control to fill the gaps left by ill-conceived
renewal strategies and contain the poor within the peripheries of developed urban cores. By evoking the emotional issue of crime, a very real
problem for Cape Town, an urban renewal agenda that serves a very narrow slice of the city’s population can introduce this new urban segregation
under the guise of development. The response to street children in the
CBD constitutes a moral panic that rearticulates race and class tensions
in terms of threats to order and mobilizes resources (emotional, organizational, and financial) to confront these threats.
That public and private security forces become central to the city’s
response is far from surprising given that even under the best of circumstances, insufficient time has passed to overcome patterns that are more
than a century old.

In 1993 Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and a group of like-minded architects and planners came together to wage war against the rules and practices that had produced sprawl. They called their movement the Congress for the New Urbanism—the name a cheeky reference and reaction to the CIAM—Congrès Internationaux d’architecture moderne—the fraternity formed by Le Corbusier and other European modernists in 1928. The New Urbanists were determined to undo the modernists’ work. They wrote a manifesto calling for compact, mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods of walkable street networks, with transit and attractive public spaces, all framed by buildings that responded to the local culture and climate.
The Congress for the New Urbanism has now grown into a powerful movement with thousands of members. Their ideas, which incorporate much of what Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander and Jan Gehl first proposed decades ago, have become accepted thinking among new generations of city planners.

…

This is the system that some have come to call sprawl. I will call it the dispersed city, for the characteristic that defines almost every aspect of it.
While the world’s architectural critics and so-called thought leaders tend to focus their attention on iconic structures and rare designs, the journey to the happy city must begin out here, in the landscape of the infinitely repeated form, on the plains of dispersal. For every new urban plaza, starchitect-designed tower, or sleek new light-rail network, there are a hundred thousand cul-de-sacs out in the dispersed city. This is the environment that, more than any other, defines how Americans and millions of people in wealthy cities across the globe move, live, work, play, and perceive the world, and how millions more will live if cities return to the trajectory they were on before the crash.

…

The region came to exhibit a classic case of what transportation analysts call induced traffic, a phenomenon in which new highway lanes invariably clog up with hundreds of thousands of cars driven by new drivers on their way to new neighborhoods fed by new road capacity, a tendency that creates entirely new traffic jams faster than the time it takes to finish paying off a new car.* The average time it takes for new urban highway capacity to fill up with new demand? Five to six years.
Now, although it has bloated to twelve lanes in many sections, Atlanta’s Perimeter still grinds to a standstill during peak hours.* The driver who once prayed for congestion-easing highway lanes and got them is still stuck in traffic. Through the windshield view of presentism, he may have forgotten the futility of his old wish for more road space, and now he might well demand that engineers build a few more lanes to solve the problem.

Birkdale was meant to serve as an antidote to the dislocation of the regular suburbs, and an application of a theory known as New Urbanism to the real world. The approach was first pioneered by the urbanist Jane Jacobs, a vocal critic of the land-use policies of the 1950s. Jacobs believed that the common practice of separating residences from businesses dislocated people from the real, vibrant spaces of more naturally developed towns and destroyed any opportunity for community. She often held up Manhattan’s Greenwich Village as an example of a thriving urban community. Its confusing streets exemplified the delightfully messy mixed use she so admired. Keeping stores and workshops adjacent to schools and homes allows for random interactions between people and keeps the sidewalks busy and safe late into the night.
It’s hard to plan a town from scratch according to the principles of New Urbanism. Greenwich Village happened over a couple of centuries.

…

You can’t just open part of a town when that town is supposed to seem like a preexisting “destination,” whose charm and attraction is based on its vibrancy and cohesiveness. The whole place needed to be activated at the same moment—every store leased, and as many apartments as possible rented in advance. Only then could the ribbon be cut, and Birkdale set into motion.
Dunning is the first to admit that he bent the rules of New Urban-ism to fit the realities of his development situation. “Strict New Urbanism is dogmatically sustainable and ecologically friendly development. But there are market forces, developer mind-sets, retail mind-sets, and economic realities that don’t always merge easily with what we’d really like to happen,” he says. While Dunning first conceived Birkdale as a real residential community with a few small shops, its financiers required a level of funding that only big anchor stores could provide.

…

Towns like Birkdale—and there are a few dozen now in full swing—refocus people on how they’re living instead of just where they’re getting, and create destinations off the highway where the most jaded automotive suburbanites can get a taste of what it’s like to walk around outside with other people.
Isn’t reconnecting to a fake town better than not connecting at all? Although the New Urbanism aesthete will deride the people of Birkdale for responding to the cues embedded in its absolutely planned and artificial re-creation of small-town life, where does such orthodoxy get us? Is Birkdale just a cynical application of watered-down New Urbanism to make the Gap look and feel more like a local business? Or does it help transform the otherwise alienating landscape of the suburbs into a healthier, more potentially social setting?
Perhaps it is the latter. But these master-planned faux villages would stand no chance at all of endearing themselves to people who weren’t already, and by design, disconnected and alienated from the places where they live.

., New York, in 1996.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Wilson, William J., [date]
When work disappears : the world of the new urban poor /
William Julius Wilson.—first ed.
p. cm.
1. Urban poor—United States.
2. Afro-Americans—Employment.
3. Inner cities—United States.
1. Title
HV4045.W553 1996
362.′0973′091732—dc20 96–11803
eISBN: 978-0-307-79469-7
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1
To Beverly
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I THE NEW URBAN POVERTY
CHAPTER 1 From Institutional to Jobless Ghettos
CHAPTER 2 Societal Changes and Vulnerable Neighborhoods
CHAPTER 3 Ghetto-Related Behavior and the Structure of Opportunity
CHAPTER 4 The Fading Inner-City Family
CHAPTER 5 The Meaning and Significance of Race: Employers and Inner-City Workers
PART 2 THE SOCIAL POLICY CHALLENGE
CHAPTER 6 The American Belief System Concerning Poverty and Welfare
CHAPTER 7 Racial Antagonisms and Race-Based Social Policy
CHAPTER 8 A Broader Vision: Social Policy Options in Cross-National Perspective
APPENDIXES
A.

…

The third study is a 1989–90 survey of a representative sample of black mothers and up to two of their adolescent children (ages 11 to 16) in working- and middle-class neighborhoods and high-poverty neighborhoods. The respondents from the households in the high-poverty neighborhoods included 383 mothers and 614 youths. Those from the households in the working- and middle-class neighborhoods were represented by 163 mothers and 273 youths. I have integrated the data from these three studies with census-type information and relevant findings from the research of other scholars.
PART I
THE NEW URBAN POVERTY
CHAPTER 1
From Institutional to Jobless Ghettos
An elderly woman who has lived in one inner-city neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago for more than forty years reflected:
I’ve been here since March 21, 1953. When I moved in, the neighborhood was intact. It was intact with homes, beautiful homes, mini mansions, with stores, laundromats, with cleaners, with Chinese [cleaners].

…

Of course, they had no way of anticipating the rapid social and economic deterioration of communities like Bronzeville that would begin in the next decade.
The most fundamental difference between today’s inner-city neighborhoods and those studied by Drake and Cayton is the much higher levels of joblessness. Indeed, there is a new poverty in our nation’s metropolises that has consequences for a range of issues relating to the quality of life in urban areas, including race relations.
By “the new urban poverty,” I mean poor, segregated neighborhoods in which a substantial majority of individual adults are either unemployed or have dropped out of the labor force altogether. For example, in 1990 only one in three adults ages 16 and over in the twelve Chicago community areas with ghetto poverty rates held a job in a typical week of the year. Each of these community areas, located on the South and West Sides of the city, is overwhelmingly black.

Miriam van Bree, a member of the Dutch Cyclists Union (Fietsersbond), underscores this point in an interview from 2005: “Everyone thinks the netherlands is a cycling paradise, but if we didn’t put bikes on the agenda they’d be forgotten. it’s natural to cycle, but it’s not natural to make policy.”53 The provo sought to reverse this trend in the midst of its progression by politicizing both the automobile and the entire ideological framework it felt they symbolized.
Former situationist architect and amsterdam native Constant nieuwenhuys (known simply as Constant) greatly influenced the provo’s proto- situationist critique of urbanism; Henri lefebvre even referred to him as one of the primary instigators of the youth movement.54 in his essay “new Urbanism,” published in Provo (no. 9), Constant argues that the use of urban space as a conduit for automobiles destroys the possibilities for authentic, non-consumer spaces:
Traffic’s wholesale invasion of social space has led, almost imperceptibly, to violation of the most fundamental human rights. The traffic code has degraded the individual who proceeds by the only natural means of locomotion to the rank of “pedestrian,” and has curtailed his freedom of movement to such an extent that it now amounts to less than that of a vehicle.

…

This is an implicit acknowledgement that high-speed traffic is king of the road.55
Constant’s position is significant not only because he challenged the automobile as a usurper of social/material space but also because he revived and recontextualized the situationist critique in the struggle for sustainable transportation. The potentially practical applications of Schimmelpenninck’s bicycle plan and Constant’s “new Urbanism” paradigm were nonetheless ruthlessly attacked by the situationists, who saw the provo as an ineffectual youth uprising lacking a revolutionary program: “There is a modern revolution, and one of its bases could be the provos—but only without their leaders and ideology. if they want to change the world, they must get rid of these who are content to paint it white.”56 Despite the situationists’ scathing criticism— which they conveniently reserved for everyone except themselves—the provo effectively politicized the bicycle as a symbol of resistance against car culture, situating the White Bicycle plan within a radical critique of capitalism, public space, and environmental pollution. at a pragmatic level, the provo simultaneously pioneered the first public-use bicycle program in amsterdam, a model since replicated in European cities like Copenhagen (Denmark), Milan (italy), Helsinki (Finland), and rennes (France). in the United States, activists and bike enthusiasts similarly embraced the provo philosophy by constructing yellow bikes, pink bikes, checkered bikes, and green bikes out of salvaged materials, leaving them on the streets for anyone to use.57 While these programs have been largely unsuccessful due to bike theft and vandalism, their appearance in cities like portland, Minneapolis–St. paul (Minnesota), Boulder (Colorado), Olympia (Washington), austin (Texas), and princeton (new Jersey) inspired a new generation of cyclists and simultaneously introduced americans to the very idea of public bike-sharing programs that have the potential to become a vibrant part of the urban transportation schema in the United States.58
Ecotactiques and Anti-automobile Shows
The provo demonstrated how bicycles could be symbolically and pragmatically incorporated into public protests as well as a sustained critique of car culture. in doing so, it pointed to the bicycle as a utopian mode of transportation, one ideally suited for a more egalitarian and ecologically sustainable society.

…

roelof Wittink, “planning for Cycling Supports road Safety,” in Sustainable Transport: Planning for Walking and Cycling in Urban Environments, ed. rodney Tolley (Cambridge, UK: Woodhead, 2003), 175.
Dara Colwell, “riding to the rescue,” Village Voice, august 29, 2005.
Kristin ross and Henri lefebvre, “lefebvre on the Situationists: an interview,” October 79 (1997): 71.
Constant nieuwenhuys, “nieuw Urbanisme,” translated as “new Urbanism,” in BAMN, 2–6 (originally published in Provokatie, no. 9 [1966]).
Situationist international with students at the University of Strasbourg, “On the poverty of Student life,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Ca: Bureau of public Secrets, 1981), 328 (originally published in paris in 1966). Emphasis is my own. in the same essay, the Si lambasts the provo’s conceptualization of the provotariat as a “politico-artistic salad knocked up from the leftovers of a feast they had never known.”

Enabled by successions of mayors and governors and fueled by billions of federal dollars in Works Progress Administration and Interstate Highway funds, Moses amassed as many as twelve directorships and leadership positions over vital public works agencies, from the New York City Parkway Authority to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to the state parks. The federal government created massive public works programs to build new urban roads and housing to replace the “slum” infrastructure of the nineteenth century. Moses was first in line to provide these “urban renewal” projects.
The almost incomprehensible list of projects that he moved from planning to implementation from 1918 to his departure from government in 1968 included seventeen parkways and fourteen expressways that ringed and connected the city, and aesthetic and engineering marvels like the Verrazano-Narrows, Bronx-Whitestone, and Triborough bridges.

…

Jacobs understood that the neighborhoods and the streets of a city contain the seeds for renewal, and it is local residents who will ultimately lead the way. But after decades of lifelessness and danger, it’s obvious that cities will not succeed in transforming themselves through market forces, consensus, or by waiting for infrastructure to crumble before taking action. Retrofitting our cities for the new urban age and achieving Jane Jacobs’s vision today will require Moses-like vision and action for building the next generation of city roads, ones that will accommodate pedestrians, bikes, and buses safely and not just single-occupancy vehicles with their diminishing returns for our streets. Cities must adopt a more inclusive and humane approach to reshaping the urban realm and rebuilding it quickly to human scale, driven by a robust community process, but committed to delivering projects and not paralyzing them.

…

., Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon—more than fifty cities in total in nearly half of all fifty states. New York City’s forty miles of protected paths installed by 2014 led to dramatic decreases in traffic injuries by all street users, not just bike riders.
In the absence of guidance, some cities have found new inspiration in Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach, produced in 2010 by the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Institute of Transportation Engineers. The guide was a huge step forward simply by including real-world examples of street design principles that cities have implemented and by representing people in the guide’s designs and their perspective of the street.
And as more cities have experimented with innovative and bold street treatments, the heads of their transportation agencies have for the first time created their own playbook, incorporating designs that are now being perfected in cities across the continent.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by
Bruce Katz,
Jennifer Bradley

A similar movement is happening in metropolitan areas across the
United States, where creativity and innovation—two of the nation’s greatest resources—are most concentrated. The timing is no coincidence. As has
happened many times throughout American history, many of the greatest
innovations have come at times of great challenge, and this moment, on
the heels of a string of economic troubles, is no exception. The financial crisis and the Great Recession proved that we could no longer apply
old solutions to new urban problems, nor could cities exclusively rely on
the action of the federal government. Rather, local governments and civil
society as well as business leaders and urban planners have come together
to chart their own course to spark job creation and catalyze long-term
economic growth.
00-2151-2 fm.indd 8
5/21/13 10:10 AM
FOREWORD
ix
In The Metropolitan Revolution, Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
describe, in good detail, many examples of how this economic, social,
and political transformation is playing out across the United States.

…

More specifically, as these populations in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere become more urbanized, their
demand for U.S.-made goods rises. By 2025, McKinsey & Company estimates, 1 billion more people will have entered the global “consuming
class,” meaning that they will have enough income to be consumers of
global goods. The bulk of these consumers will live in cities outside of the
United States and Europe. McKinsey estimates that of these 1 billion new
urban consumers, 600 million will live in 440 cities in emerging markets,
markets that will be responsible for half of global GDP growth between
2010 and 2025.45 That growth will contribute to an already large market for goods that exists outside the United States; according to the U.S.
International Trade Administration, 70 percent of the world’s purchasing
power is located outside the United States.46
Places that innovate will be able to take advantage of rising global
demand for new kinds of products and services.

…

Transit corridors are the physical tissue that knits disparate parts of
a city together. They have the potential, with smart land use and catalytic
policies, to be multidimensional in purpose, expanding transportation
choices and mobility, to be sure, but also galvanizing new destinations
along their routes, including new residential areas, retail clusters, and economic districts.
Across the United States, fledgling innovation districts are beginning
to take hold in this new urban geography of innovation. In Houston, a
new light-rail system connects the strong central business district (with its
phalanx of energy company headquarters) with the Museum District, the
Houston Medical Campus, and the University of Houston. In Cleveland,
the new Euclid Corridor Bus Rapid Transit system connects the traditional
downtown with University Circle (with Case Western, Cleveland Clinic,
and key cultural institutions).

Like the earlier European experience of industrialisation, dispossessed rural workers have migrated to urban areas to find jobs. And in Europe, too, this process sometimes led to slum-dwelling and destitution for the new urban proletariat.98 But this is where the similarities end, as in Europe the transition involved creating sufficient numbers of jobs, the emergence of a strong industrial working class, and the eventual provision of housing for migrants.99 Under conditions of postcolonial development, this narrative has been broken. Rather than a scarcity of labour, recent industrialisation has occurred in the context of a large and global labour force.100 The result has been little development of anything resembling a traditional working class, continually weak job prospects and a lack of adequate housing.101 New urban migrants have been left in a permanent state of transition between peasantry and proletarianisation, and sometimes in seasonal circulation between rural existence and urban poverty.102 Slums and other improvised housing therefore represent a dual expulsion from the land and from the formal economy.103 This surplus humanity, having been deprived of its traditional means of subsistence yet left without employment, has been forced to create its own non-capitalist subsistence economies.

…

Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Silvia Federici, ‘Wages Against Housework’, in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).
32.In terms of global unemployment, women have faced the brunt of the crisis in recent years. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), p. 18.
33.For example, black males in the United States were particularly affected by the automation and outsourcing of manufacturing. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), pp. 29–31.
34.Michael McIntyre, ‘Race, Surplus Population, and the Marxist Theory of Imperialism’, Antipode 43:5 (2011), p. 1500–2.
35.These draw broadly upon the divisions Marx drew between the floating/reserve army, latent and stagnant, but are here offered as an updating of his historical example.
36.Gary Fields, Working Hard, Working Poor: A Global Journey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 46.
37.This is what Kalyan Sanyal describes as ‘need economies’.

Their hyperfunctional connectivity over a plane vertically separated above or below the traditional street, she argues, works to ‘create an extreme form of stratification in a context better suited for mixture, the integration of people from all different races and classes.’21 Poor urban minorities, Terranova writes, have often been relegated to residualised and exteriorised street levels ‘where retail has tended to languish and reserving the walkway system for white-collar workers.’
Conversely, the world within the interior complexes is, at best, private/public space organised overwhelmingly around the imperatives of consumption. The move from outside to inside is a passage between worlds. ‘Step from the wind and cold on the street outside into the new urban realm’, invites architecture critic Trevor Boddy. ‘As the glass doors firmly close, the mental realm changes. We are inside, contained, separate, part of the system, a consumer, a pursuer, a cruiser.’22
There is certainly strong evidence that interior cities in North America often ‘accommod[ate] those activities (and people) that can be commercially exploited, expelling the rest.’23 In many cities, the raised up (or subterranean) system has become the dominant means for pedestrians to move around the downtown area.

…

It is also particularly thick beneath old industrial cities which have experienced many cycles of construction and destruction. The cycle here is as old as urbanisation itself, although the scale of the processes involved has multiplied massively in the last two centuries. Fire, disaster, war, replanning, obsolescence, ruination or simply the desire for improvement leads to the demolition or destruction of buildings or infrastructure, or simply to their absorption into a higher level of ground, aided by gravity. New urban soils are gradually created from ‘trash, construction debris, coal ash, dredged sediments, petrochemical contamination, green lawns, decomposing bodies, and rock ballast.’6 Such accretions, in turn, are flattened to create a new, raised, surface level, which then becomes the building surface and the new ‘ground’ level.
Over centuries, large cities thus literally rise up on ground of their own making.

…

By this date, a body of material weighing 200 times as much as the Empire State Building – that’s 9 kg for very person on Earth – will be dumped on the fringes of coastal cities, largely in China, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, to be dismantled and processed by hand, by armies of poor labourers, often in appalling conditions. Once the valuable metals and parts are removed the rest will sediment itself into new urban ground.19
The ‘Archaeosphere’
The science of geology has evolved to study the stratigraphic accumulation of rocks and materials through ‘natural’ processes. Archaeology, by contrast, developed to understand the evolution of human societies through their preserved material legacies in the ground. Is manufactured ground the preserve, then, of the geologist or the archaeologist?
Well, both: the proliferation of artificial ground is drawing the two disciplines into unprecedented collaboration.

Adams of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, in their landmark paper on the subject, published in the journal Science more than a half-century ago, concluded that[p]robably there is no historical event of this magnitude for which a single explanation is adequate, but that growing soil salinity played an important part in the breakup of Sumerian civilization seems beyond question.71
It should be noted that increasing salinity of soil led to massive crop failures and a similar entropy crisis in the Indus Valley 4,000 years ago.72 Likewise, archaeologists have found evidence of soil salinity leading to catastrophic crop failure and the abandonment of territory in the ancient Mayan hydraulic civilization in Central America.73 In point of fact, salinization of soil and entropic buildup have been a precipitating factor in the weakening and collapse of complex hydraulic civilizations throughout history, reaffirming the inescapable relationship between increasing energy throughput and a rising entropy debt.74
ALL OF THE GREAT axial movements stressed the importance of the Golden Rule. But it was in Rome that the full impact of the new dictum came to the fore with the rise of a new urban religious sect that would be known as Christianity. The early Christian eschatology represented both the final flowering of the empathic surge of ancient theological times and the bridge to the modern era of humanism and the secularization of empathic consciousness.
SEVEN
COSMOPOLITAN ROME AND THE RISE OF URBAN CHRISTIANITY
THE ROMAN EMPIRE represents the “high watermark” for ancient hydraulic civilizations.

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They offered a spiritual universalism, but only by becoming a part of the Jewish nation. The Romans, by contrast, offered a political and judicial universalism, but their civic gods were too cold and distant to address the angst of an increasingly individualized Roman population in search of personal identification within a larger cosmic story.
Neither the Jews nor the cult of the Roman pantheon of gods could provide the new urban population of Rome the very personal spiritual succor they so desperately craved. Rome was ready for the Christian story. Erich Kahler eloquently sums up the historic significance of the rise of Christianity in Rome in the first three centuries of the AD era.
The fundamental innovation of this whole epoch is that the individual stands forth, the lonely private individual, with all his ancestral, tribal bonds broken off, the earthly individual standing on his own feet, under the vast sky of universality.

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., in his book The Making of the Modern Mind, notes that the reverse flow back from the countryside to the newly emerging towns, with their own unique “vows and obligations,” was to have a profound impact on the whole future course of history. He writes:The rise of the urban civilization, first primarily commercial and later more and more industrial, was the outstanding social force in the later Middle Ages; from it can be traced practically everything that, beginning with the renaissance . . . created modern times.1
The new urban civilization brought with it an empathic surge that would take European consciousness to new heights. The late medieval empathic surge began with a technological revolution in agriculture and a novel harnessing of biological and inanimate energy.
The introduction of the horse into agriculture greatly increased agricultural productivity. While draught horses were used in a very limited way as far back as antiquity, it wasn’t until the invention of the shoulder harness, iron horseshoes, and the harnessing of horses, one behind the other, that horses could be effectively utilized for plowing and other chores.

On the other hand, the emphasis on interactivity between places breaks up spatial patterns of behavior into a fluid network of exchanges that underlies the emergence of a new kind of space, the space of flows. On both counts, I must tighten the analysis and raise it to a more theoretical level.
The Transformation of Urban Form: the Informational City
The Information Age is ushering in a new urban form, the informational city. Yet, as the industrial city was not a worldwide replica of Manchester, the emerging informational city will not copy Silicon Valley, let alone Los Angeles. On the other hand, as in the industrial era, in spite of the extraordinary diversity of cultural and physical contexts there are some fundamental common features in the transcultural development of the informational city.

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America’s last suburban frontier
The image of a homogeneous, endless suburban/ex-urban sprawl as the city of the future is belied even by its unwilling model, Los Angeles, whose contradictory complexity is revealed by Mike Davis’s marvelous City of Quartz.60 Yet it does evoke a powerful trend in the relentless waves of suburban development in the American metropolis, West and South as well as North and East, toward the end of the millennium. Joel Garreau has captured the similarities of this spatial model across America in his journalistic account of the rise of Edge City, as the core of the new urbanization process. He empirically defines Edge City by the combination of five criteria:
Edge City is any place that: (a) Has five million square feet or more of leasable office space – the work place of the Information Age… (b) Has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space… (c) Has more jobs than bedrooms (d) Is perceived by the population as one place… (e) Was nothing like ‘city’ as recently as thirty years ago.61
He reports the mushrooming of such places around Boston, New Jersey, Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Texas, southern California, San Francisco Bay area, and Washington, DC.

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They are both working areas and service centers around which mile after mile of increasingly dense, single-family dwelling residential units organize the “home centeredness” of private life. He remarks that these ex-urban constellations are:
tied together not by locomotives and subways, but by freeways, jetways, and rooftop satellite dishes thirty feet across. Their characteristic monument is not a horse-mounted hero, but the atria reaching for the sun and shielding trees perpetually in leaf at the core of corporate headquarters, fitness centers, and shopping plazas. These new urban areas are marked not by the penthouses of the old urban rich or the tenements of the old urban poor. Instead, their landmark structure is the celebrated single-family detached dwelling, the suburban home with grass all around that made America the best housed civilization the world has ever known.62
Naturally, where Garreau sees the relentless frontier spirit of American culture, always creating new forms of life and space, James Howard Kunstler sees the regrettable domination of the “geography of nowhere,” 63 thus reigniting a decades-long debate between partisans and detractors of America’s sharp spatial departure from its European ancestry.

Royal Institute of British Architects.
214 “a monstrous carbuncle on the face”: Ibid.
214 “Why has everything got to be vertical”: Ibid.
214 “a giant glass stump”: Ibid.
214 but the prince won, sort of: “Victoriana vs. Mies in London,” New York Times, May 3, 1984, p. C18.
214 “an early Victorian market town”: Worsley, “A Model Village Grows Up Gracefully.”
214 forces behind the New Urbanist movement: Watson et al., Learning from Poundbury, 8.
214 New Urbanism “stand[s] for . . . our built legacy”: Charter of the New Urbanism, www.cnu.org/charter.
214 more conservationist than the New Urbanist communities of America: Compare the Web site of Poundbury, www.duchyofcornwall.org/designanddevelopment_poundbury_livinginpoundbury.htm, with its note that “It is intended to be a sustainable development” and that it is “designed to maintain the quality of the environment” and its photographs of green space, with the Web site of Celebration, Florida, www.celebration.fl.us/towninfo.html, with its emphasis on its “strong sense of self ” and photographs of people at play.
215 In Celebration, 91 percent of people who leave their homes to work take cars: U.S.

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Prince Charles’s fight for traditional British architecture continues unabated, as does his fight for his “model community” of Poundbury. In his agricultural estates in Cornwall, the prince is building his vision of an ideal English town, which has been described as looking like “an early Victorian market town, as if architecture stopped in 1830.” His royal patronage has given a great boost to Leon Krier, Poundbury’s planner, who is also one of the intellectual forces behind the New Urbanist movement. The New Urbanism “stand[s] for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.”
Poundbury is considerably more conservationist than the New Urbanist communities of America, such as Seaside, Florida; Kentlands, Maryland; Breakaway, North Carolina; and the Disney Corporation’s town of Celebration, Florida.

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Bradley
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
Missouri
Mitchell, George Phydias
Mittal, Lakshmi
Mobutu Sese Seko
Mohammed, Sheikh
Monkkonen, Eric
Montreal
Moses, Robert
Moving to Opportunity
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mumbai
building restrictions in
crime in
Dharavi neighborhood of
disease in
traffic congestion in
transportation network in
Mumford, Lewis
murder
Murthy, Narayana
museums
music
Mysore
Nagasaki
Napoléon I, Emperor
Napoléon III, Emperor
Nashville
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
National Labor Relations Act (1935)
Native Son (Wright)
neighborhood preservation, see preservation
Netherlands
Nevins, Allan
New Brighton
New Deal
New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina in
poor in
New Urbanism
New York City
African Americans in
age statistics in
Bloomberg as mayor of
building construction in
Central Park
commuting in
crime in
death rates in
decline of
entrepreneurs in
environmental footprint of
fair-housing law in
Fifth Avenue Commission in
finance in
founding of
garment and fashion industries in
garment worker strike in
Giuliani as mayor of
globalization and
Greenwich Village
Harlem Children’s Zone in
Harlem Renaissance in
health in
Hell’s Kitchen
housing in
immigrants in
industries in
Koch as mayor of
Lindsay as mayor of
Lower East Side
marital statistics in
Midtown Manhattan
Penn Station in
poor in
population explosion in
port of
preservation in
Promise Academy in
public transportation in
publishing industry in
rebirth of
restaurants in
reverse commuting and
rise of
September 11 attack on
social connections in
sprawl in
streets in
subways in
suicides in
Tammany Hall in
taxes in
theater in
transit and income zones in
travel between Boston and
Upper East Side
wages in
Washington Square
water supply for
zoning regulations in
New York Panorama
New York Philharmonic
New York State
energy consumption in
parkway system of
New York Times
NIMBYism
Nimitz, Chester
9/11 attacks
Norberg, Karen
Obama, Barack
Oklahoma City
Old Vic Theatre Company
Olivier, Laurence
Olmsted, Frederick Law
Otis, Elisha
O’Toole, Peter
Otto, Nikolaus
Owen, David
Paris
building regulations in
bus transit in
Eiffel Tower in
housing in
La Défense in
Montparnasse Tower in
paving of
planning of
police force formed in
restaurants in
schools in
sewage system in
transit and income zones in
parks
Pascal, Blaise
patent citations
Patni Computers
Pedro II, Emperor
Penn Station
Pennsylvania Railroad
Pericles
Perlman, Philip
Philadelphia
Main Line in
transit and income zones in
water supply in
Philip Augustus
Phoenix
Phukan, Ruban
Pinker, Steven
Pirelli, Giovanni Battista
Pittsburgh
plague
Plato
police
policies, see public policies
politics
ethnic
power and
social groups and
Ponti, Gio
populations:
loss of
new building and
wages and
Potemkin villages
Poulsen, Valdemar
Poundbury
poverty
rural
suburban
poverty, urban
African Americans and
and attraction of poor to cities
education and
in favelas
and helping people vs. places
in megacities
path to prosperity from
public policies’ magnification of
in Rio
slums and ghettos
transportation and
Prada, Miuccia
preservation
in New York City
printing press
prisons
Procopius
productivity
education and
geographic proximity and
impact of peers on
skills and
wages and
Promise Academy
property rights
prosperity and wealth
education and
environmentalism and
path from urban poverty to
urbanization and
Protestantism
public policies
building restrictions
consumer cities and
education and
environmental; see also environmentalism
helping people vs. places
immigration and
industrial
land-use regulations
level playing field in
national
NIMBYism and
poverty magnified by
preservation, see preservation
suburban living encouraged by
urban poverty and
zoning ordinances, see zoning ordinances
public spaces
publishing:
in New York
printing technology and
Pulitzer, Joseph
quality of life
Quigley, John
Raffles, Thomas Stamford
rail travel
Ramsay, Gordon
Rand, Ayn
Ranieri, Lewis
Raytheon
recession
Reformation
Renaissance
restaurants
Richardson, Ralph
Richmond
right-to-work states
Rio de Janeiro
favelas in
transportation in
riots
River Rouge plant
Riverside
roads
asphalt paving for
highways
New York City streets
traffic congestion and, see traffic congestion
Robson Square
Rochester (Minnesota)
Rochester (New York)
Rockefeller, Nelson
Rogers, Richard
Roman Empire
Roosevelt, Franklin D.

“After growing up in a small town in Massachusetts,” he writes in his preface, “I went off to pastoral Vermont to study and then work, all the while developing an appreciation and concern for the fragile state of the world’s ecology. But as easy as it is to don a green hat up in Vermont, the beast that is New York City has the tendency to tear that noble lid off and throw it into a puddle of mud. Upon arriving in the big city I struggled to reconcile the environmentally concerned mind-set that comes so effortlessly in a place like Vermont with my new urban lifestyle. Of course sustainable living is easier in a Vermont township, where local produce is plentiful and every backyard is equipped with a compost bin.”12
But this is exactly wrong. “Sustainable living” is actually much harder in small, far-flung places than it is in dense cities. Jervey cites New Yorkers’ “overactive dependence” on fresh water as an example of their supposed wastefulness, and he marvels that the city’s total use “amounts to well over one billion gallons per day.”13 A billion is a big number, to be sure, but New York City’s population is more than thirteen times that of the entire state of Vermont, so the city’s total consumption figures in any category will appear overwhelming in any direct comparison.

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Los Angeles is at or near the top of almost everyone’s list of the examples of automobile-dependent development, but L.A. is actually quite dense, as American cities go, with an average concentration, inside the city limits, of just over 8,200 people per square mile, or nearly 13 people per acre. This is fairly close to Zupan and Pushkarev’s critical transit threshold of seven dwellings per acre—and it exceeds the density of many developments that have been promoted as examples of New Urbanism, or Smart Growth—yet only a microscopic percentage of Angelenos travel to work in anything but a car, and, largely because of the separation of uses mandated by local zoning regulations, there are very few parts of the city where transit, bicycling, or walking are feasible as regular means of getting around, no matter what the price of gasoline. Uninhibited car use invariably undermines the noblest of environmental intentions—always, everywhere.h
In the early 1900s, Los Angeles, like many other American cities, actually had a thriving streetcar system—a variety of the type of transit that, nowadays, is usually referred to as light rail.

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A brochure shows the cars being charged by rooftop solar panels and hydrogen-powered fuel cells. Ryan Chin, a Ph.D. candidate and the project’s coordinator, said, “The idea is to have the vehicle work in unison with its urban surroundings, taking advantage of existing infrastructure, such as subway and bus lines. Ultimately we see this as an effective way to merge mass transit with individualized mobility, creating a new urban transportation ecosystem.”52
But the City Car, as described by its inventors, is a good idea only if you believe that not being able to find a parking space is an environmental problem, and that dense urban areas have something to gain from getting pedestrians off their feet and into cars. Residents of dense urban cores largely get by without individual vehicles now; what would be gained by turning those people into drivers of high-tech golf carts?

But nonetheless, this north–south divide constituted a force field in which the two classes recognized themselves and each other through a range of powerful reference points.
However, just as we have argued that the fundamental class boundaries lie at the top of the social hierarchy, so the power of this regional divide has now broken down. It has been replaced by two other dynamics: firstly, the power of highly segregated urban cores as elite zones. The process of intense elite segregation can be detected in all major British cities – and that new urban investment has generated more powerful manifestations of this. Secondly the dominance of central London is now paramount and overwhelms that of the north–south divide. These two shifts generate a more powerful urban–rural division than used to be the case. Cities (especially London, but the process extends to other cities) are the centres of accumulation. The countryside is defined in terms of the repose – the rest and recuperation – it offers in the context of these voracious urban driving belts.

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Figure 8.5 Percentage Shares of the Elite within Just One Quartile of Postal Sectors in 10 Major Built-up Areas in Britain
Source: GBCS data
Class and inequality are central to how we conceive of and construct our cities. Class has an interactive relationship with space because those with greater economic capital have greater choice about where. They possess freedoms which the housing market does not extend to those of lesser means. The elite class also have the power to transform and colonize new urban spaces both physically and socially, through processes of top-end ‘gentrification’.13 Mapping where those in the elite live in a detailed way is instructive because it opens up the different forms of ‘elective belonging’ that people hold – the emotional, economic and other reasons that bind them to particular places.14
The Manchester elite exemplifies this geography well, because this is the most segregated in class terms according to GBCS data of British cities.

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There is therefore an unequal geography in the cultural and social domains as well as in the economic. These overlap, but imperfectly, showing that the wider identities of places cannot be read from their economic capital and prosperity alone. A powerful urban–rural divide, as much as a regional one between north and south, is marked in terms of the way urban centres operate as foci of cultural capital (especially emerging cultural capital) and social capital.
And marking out these new urban spaces, we see the power of the elite as having a profound geographical imprint, as this is fundamentally an urban class. The old aristocratic class with roots in the land, at the apex of the class structure, has given way to a more fundamentally urbanized class – though one quite possibly with second homes tucked away in areas of repose. This, as Piketty has demonstrated, is an aspect of the profound shift in the organization of capital towards residential property and away from agricultural land.24
Underscoring all this is London itself.

Some plans worked, and some didn’t. Many of the new public housing projects in America destroyed intricate communities to make room for buildings designed on an inhuman scale. Still other plans were swiftly defeated by the relentless pressure of human nature. In Tokyo, which was flattened during World War II, planners saw a chance to erase the ancient and convoluted street grid and build what one scholar called “an entirely new urban form,” with a series of dense downtowns “nestled against a background of green space, green corridors and broad tree-lined boulevards.” It didn’t happen. American bombs destroyed buildings, but didn’t destroy the claims of property owners, who resisted giving up their land. It was quicker and easier to build along the old streets. A glance at history might have shown this would happen; the world’s most famous example of urban planning, Sir Christopher Wren’s redesign of central London after a great fire in 1666, was never put in place.

The two great political reform acts of 1832 and 1867 further shifted the balance of power in parliament in favour of new urban middle and even working classes. By the end of the nineteenth century, as land was slipping out of mainstream economic thinking (see Chapter 3), the political power of the landowning class was diminishing too (Linklater, 2013).
Housing supply and tenure
The rapid increase in urban populations created a huge demand for accommodation in Britain’s major cities, most of which were not prepared for this increase in population. Large houses were turned into flats and tenements, and multiple families were crowded into already crammed houses by often unscrupulous landlords who saw an opportunity for quick profit. During this time those who ran the dominant industries in the city often wielded significant power, and much of the housing needs of the new urban workers were met by factory owners who built accommodation near their factories.

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Leases were often sold for the lifetime of the tenant, giving an appearance of permanence, but landlords were clearly able to extract a high degree of economic rent: the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (1885) found that almost half of working class households were paying 25–50% of their income on rent alone (Samy, 2015). In part, this was due to the lack of transport, which required industrial workers to live near to the factories that employed them.
In the new, urban and industrial economy that had been created, the problem of rent was still alive and well. But now it found its strongest expression in the housing market, rather than in the agricultural fields that Ricardo had originally used to explain his theory.
4.3 1900–1970: world wars and the golden age of capitalism
By the dawn of the twentieth century there was an increasing awareness among social and political elites that the social problems of industrial, urban Britain were rooted in the economic and physical organisation of land and property, triggering interest in how these problems could be overcome at a more systemic level (Simpson et al., 1992).

They are changing the character and flavor of their cities, and their concerns for raising children are helping them lead charges for safer streets and better education where contextual tools play a part.
These New Urbanists reverse a trend followed by each generation since the end of World War II. For more than 60 years, people migrated out of cities, into suburbs. Today, instead of opting for freestanding single-family homes surrounded by lawns, fences and chirping birds, this emerging generation is massively opting for less pastoral—and more stimulating—urban settings.
New Urbanism is changing American demographic trends. Multiple reports, including those from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Brookings Institution, see multiyear trends where cities are growing younger and more affluent, while suburbs are shrinking, aging and experiencing increases in poverty.
New Urbanists lead contextual lives in cities being planned, designed and rebuilt with contextual technologies.

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However, when we look at a few forward-thinking municipal governments we see glimmers of hope.
New Urbanists are active proponents of safer streets, reduced pollution, transparent government and neighborhood activism. They are using contextual technologies as power tools for change.
Their shopping—even when local—is becoming mobile device-centric. They are encouraging and adopting new services that allow local merchants to deliver goods to urban doors.
New Urbanism is not only taking hold in such cultural centers as New York and San Francisco, but also in previously forsaken places like Pittsburgh, Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio, which is reporting a significant growth in young adults, spawned in part by a tech center that employs more than 300 people, mostly recent college grads. Even Cleveland, which in 2010 was voted America’s most miserable city, is enjoying a resurgence of energy from this desirable demographic.

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The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think
by
Matthew Yglesias

The ability of real estate developers to ride the currents of supply and demand ensures that land should always be a low portion of overall housing costs.
According to Shiller, this tendency makes the land speculation issue a red herring in terms of house prices: “There will be a natural process of finding ways to build homes on less land, or less expensive land. This can be achieved either through building higher-density housing, such as more and taller apartment buildings or infill development in urban centers, or founding new urban areas.” Indeed, the United States still has plenty of empty space. So one could always respond to complaints about the rent being too high by suggesting that you move or build elsewhere. The rent may be too damn high in Santa Monica and Seattle, but it’s a good deal cheaper in Sioux Falls.
Different pieces of land have different characteristics. The weather is different. The amenities are different.

Just as stories about life in the 1950s reveal the emptiness and sham of stories around the wonderful things that flow from higher mobility so the same stories tell us that there are many examples of sustainable cities and child friendly cities and they did exist and we did destroy them. If we really do want to restore this kind of world with all its benefits we can only do so if we redefine our love affair with mobility, redefine it as an historical blip, show how lower mobility produces magnified benefits and embed 21st century “new” urban thinking in a strong low mobility context. That is the objective of this book.
During the development of these ideas in the next 14 chapters it will be important to keep uppermost in our minds the very clear implication of “low mobility”. Low mobility is a decoupling concept. This book argues that we must decouple mobility from its association with progress, happiness and quality of life. The consumption of ever-increasing amounts of distance does not increase happiness or improve quality of life and is associated with a growing list of negative consequences.

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This will not “sit well” with the world view of most of us in 2015 but the point of this book is to demonstrate that a low mobility world has a great deal to offer and its opposite is a logical impossibility. We cannot accommodate an annual average percentage increase in distance travelled for all 7 billion of us so we may as well start explaining, designing and delivering a low mobility alternative.
It could not be clearer that most governmental statements in the UK about new urban design or so-called “active” transport (this means walking and cycling) are meaningless unless we engineer this paradigm shift from high mobility to low mobility. Such a paradigm shift also involves a shift in language. The phrase “low mobility” whilst accurately describing a world characterized by fewer kilometres travelled per person per annum fails to convey the richness of a world characterised by many more destinations opportunities within a much smaller physical area and a world where enormous amounts of time and money (and pollution) are not devoted to the business of accessing distant places.

New York City’s economy alone is larger than most of sub-Saharan Africa’s. Port cities and entrepôts such as Dubai act like twenty-first-century Venice: They are “free zones” where products are efficiently re-exported without the hassles of government red tape. Such mega-cities as Rio, Istanbul, Cairo, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Manila are the leading urban centers of their countries and regions, yet each teems with hundreds of thousands of new urban squatters each year. The migrant underclass lives not in chaos and “shadow economies” but often in functional, self-organizing ecosystems, the typical physical stratification of medieval cities. Whether rich or poor, cities, more than nations, are the building blocks of global activity today. Our world is more a network of villages than it is one global village.
Alliances of these agile cities, like the medieval Hanseatic League of the Baltic Sea, are forming.

For increasing numbers of people, gone were the days when your house was but one part of the complex that included your barn, your fields, your stables, or your orchards. If your job was in a factory or in some retail concern in the city, “work” was now a place to go to, a separate world outside the home. Cities became more differentiated into areas for working, living, and shopping. Driving this evolution was the rise of the factory as the center of economic life. “The main elements in this new urban complex,” wrote the fabled urbanist Lewis Mumford, “were the factory, the railroad and the slum…. The factory became the nucleus of this new organism. Everything else was subordinate to it.”10
Early factories were concentrated in and around the core of the city. But as the scale of production grew larger, some moved to the outskirts of towns where larger plots of land could be assembled. Pittsburgh’s steel industry, for example, developed along its three great rivers.

…

Pittsburgh suffered for two decades, “its wounds salved by the Steelers and other local sports teams, but the pain was very real,” he says. The lesson from this, he continues, is to pick yourself up and get back to work. Don’t expect the federal government or anyone else to save your city or bring back your industries. “It is that the old world will inevitably disappear, and that creating a new one is up to you, not someone else.”
One response to the problems of rusted-out industrial cities such as Detroit has been a new urban reclamation effort called “shrinking cities.”19 The idea, perhaps inspired by Pittsburgh, has caught on in smaller cities in the American Midwest, such as Youngstown, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan, and their European counterparts. The basic notion is that older industrial cities need not grow to improve. They can be better places by making do with less, by focusing on improvements in the quality of life for their residents, and by bringing their level of infrastructure and housing into line with their smaller populations.

Some of these installations, including one in Dallas, have subsequently been sanctioned and made permanent.
And of course, costs are relative. The American health crisis is predicted to be the single greatest drag on the nation’s economy in the decades ahead. We’ve watched for years as our investments in medicine have principally made medicine more expensive. It’s time to invest in walking.
* * *
Notes
1. L. Frank, keynote (18th national conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Atlanta, May 2010).
2. J. Gehl, Cities for People (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2010), 111.
3. N. Peirce, “Biking and Walking, Our Secret Weapon?,” Citiwire.net, July 16, 2009.
4. T. Gotschi and K. Mills, Active Transportation for America (Washington, D.C.: Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, 2008), 44.
5. E. Kolbert, “XXXL: Why Are We So Fat?,” The New Yorker, July 20, 2009.
6. Ibid.
7. Peirce.
8.

Interregional Highways included no maps of routes through cities, and no description of them beyond a catalog of possibilities, because the problems of extending four- and six-lane highways through dense settlement were simply too complicated and too local to generalize—besides which, it was a decision best made by the states and municipal authorities. " How near they should come to the center of the area, how they should pass it or pass through it, and by what courses they should approach it, are matters for particular planning consideration in each city," the committee decided, though it observed that surface streets carrying the heaviest traffic loads generally " pass through or very close to the existing central business areas."
Fairbank again did most, if not all, of the writing, and this time his passages on urban expressways included a cautionary note. However they were located, the new urban highways would do more than simply carry traffic; they would be " a powerful influence in shaping the city," the report predicted, and " should be located so as to promote a desirable development or at least to support a natural development rather than to retard or to distort the evolution of the city.
" In favorable locations, the new facilities, which as a matter of course should be designed for long life, will become more and more useful as time passes; improperly located, they will become more and more of an encumbrance to the city's functions and an all too durable reminder of planning that was bad."

…

Or in the second installment, when he castigated highway engineers for behaving "as if motor transportation existed in a social vacuum" and "building more roads, bridges, and tunnels so that more motorcars may travel more quickly to more remote destinations in more chaotic communities, from which more roads will be built so that more motorists may escape from these newly soiled and clotted environments."
"Our transportation experts are only expert whittlers," he wrote, "and the proof of it is that their end product is not a new urban form but a scattered mass of human shavings. Instead of curing congestion, they widen chaos."
Or in the series' third part, where he pointed out that the "fancy cures that the experts have offered for New York's congestion are based on the innocent notion that the problem can be solved by increasing the capacity of the existing traffic routes, multiplying the number of ways of getting in and out of town, or providing more parking space for cars," when the reality was that the city screamed for redesign and the dispersal of its crowd-generating employers, stores, and public amenities.

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"In the utopia that highway engineers have been busily bulldozing into existence, no precinct of the city and no part of the surrounding countryside are to remain inaccessible to automobile traffic on a large scale," he wrote. "As a formula for defacing the natural landscape and ruining what is left of our great cities, nothing could be more effective."
***
The most surprising critic of the new urban highways was the man who'd spurred their financing. It's hard to imagine how Dwight Eisenhower could have been unaware that the interstate system was designed to venture into cities, what with all the fuss in San Francisco, the controversies unfolding in Baltimore and other towns, and newspaper chatter on the paths of proposed freeways just blocks from the White House—not to mention that he'd signed the 1956 act and presumably read something about it beforehand.

The reason that the world’s rural people are moving into cities is that they can make more money in town. This is partly because of the described growth of urban economies, and partly because demand for farm labor falls as agriculture commercializes, mechanizes, and becomes export-oriented. Worldwide employment in agriculture is falling fast and in 2006, for the first time ever, it was surpassed by employment in the services sector.46 And because every new urban resident is also a new urban consumer, the cycle is self-reinforcing. More urbanites buy more electronics, services, and imported processed food, prepared and served to them by others. More entry-level jobs for new migrants are created. More managerial posts are needed. Ladders rise and the urban economy grows .47
This urban shift is driving major demographic changes around the globe. City dwellers are projected to roughly double in number by 2050, rising from 3.3 billion in 2007 to 6.4 billion in 2050.48 However, the geography of this is not uniform.

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Under the conservative ground rules of our thought experiment, it’s hard to envision how so many problems can be eliminated overnight. By 2050 I imagine much of sub-Saharan Africa—the cradle of our species—to be a dilapidated, crowded, and dangerous place.
Shifting Economic Power
Not only is the geography of the world’s urban population shifting, so also is its wealth. The economic impact of nearly two billion new urban consumers in Asia has not gone unexamined by economists. Unlike the situation in Africa, there is every indication that the rising Asian cities will be modern, globalized, and prosperous. In a thoughtful, forward-looking assessment the U.S. National Intelligence Council writes:65
The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025. . . .

In Chicago it was nearly 19 percent. 23
In the 1980s many of the nation's northern cities partially revived
by becoming hubs for the new information economy. Scores of downtown areas made the transition from "centers of production and
distribution of material goods to centers of administration, information exchange and higher order service provision."24 The emerging
knowledge-based industries have meant increased jobs for highskilled white collar and service workers. For large numbers of AfricanAmericans, however, the new urban renaissance has only served to
accentuate the ever widening employment and income gap between
highly educated whites and poor unskilled blacks.
The only Significant rise in employment among black Americans in
the past twenty-five years has been in the public sector: more than
55 percent of the net increase in employment for blacks in the 1960s
and 1970S occurred there. 25 Many black professionals found jobs in the
federal programs spawned by the Great Society initiatives of President
Lyndon Johnson.

…

Millions of unskilled workers and their families became part of what
social historians now call an underclass-a permanently unemployed
part of the population whose unskilled labor is no longer required and
who live hand-to-mouth, generation-to-generation, as wards of the
state. A second smaller group of black middle-class professionals have
been put on the public payroll to administer the many publicassistance programs designed to assist this new urban underclass. The
system represents a kind of "welfare colonialism" say authors Michael
Brown and Steven Erie, "where blacks were called upon to administer
their own state of dependence."28
It is possible that the country might have taken greater notice of
the impact that automation was having on black America in the 1960s
and 1970s, had not a significant number of Mrican-Americans been
absorbed into public-sector jobs.

The takeaway lesson is that a democratic form of self-management and governance designed to pool and share “commons” resources proved to be a resilient economic model for surviving a despotic feudal system that kept people locked in bondage.
The great Enclosure Movements across Europe that led to the downfall of feudal society, the rise of the modern market economy, and eventually the capitalist system, put an end to rural commons but not the sharing spirit that animated them. Peasant farmers took their lessons learned to the new urban landscapes where they faced an equally imposing foe in the form of factory overlords of the industrial revolution. Urban workers and an emerging middle class, like their peasant serf forbearers, pooled their common resources—this time in the form of wages and labor skills—and created new kinds of self-governing Commons. Charitable societies, schools, hospitals, trade unions, cooperatives, and popular cultural institutions of all kinds began to take root and flourish, creating the foundation for what came to be known as the civil society in the nineteenth century.

…

This period saw the flowering of what historians call the Northern Renaissance—an awakening of the arts, literature, scientific experimentation, and exploration of new worlds.
By the late medieval era, more than a thousand towns had sprung up across Europe, each bustling with economic activity. Aside from providing granaries, lodging, and shops, these urban centers became the gathering place for craftsmen of all stripes and shades. These new urban jurisdictions were often called free cities, as they were deemed independent of the reach of local lords. For example, it was customary practice that if a serf were to escape the feudal commons and take refuge in a nearby town for a year and a day, he would be deemed free, having safely left one jurisdiction and taken up residence in another.21
The craftsmen in the new towns organized themselves into guilds by trade—metalworkers, weavers and dyers, armorers, masons, broiders and glaziers, scriveners, hatters, and upholsterers—in order to establish quality standards for their goods, set fixed prices for their products, and determine how much to produce.

…

Private property exchanged in the market economy was henceforth “taken for granted as the fundamentals upon which social organization was to be based, and about which no further argument was admissible.”7 Max Weber was even more harsh, arguing that the replacement of spiritual values with economic ones in the changeover from a Christian-centered universe to a materialist one represented “the disenchantment of the world.”8
In fairness, it should be noted that despite the terrible toll in human suffering brought on by the enclosure of the commons and the letting loose of millions of peasants from their ancestral land to make their own way in a new urban world not yet ready to absorb their labor, the shift to a market economy did eventually improve the lot of the average person in ways that would be unfathomable to families living on the feudal commons.
The shift from a purely market-exchange economy in the late medieval era to a capitalist economy by the mid-nineteenth century posed serious problems in regard to the notion of property. Recall Locke’s natural right theory that what a person adds to nature by his own labor belongs to him alone in the form of private property.

Those newly free-floating laborers became another, equally essential, energy source for the Industrial Revolution, filling its cities and coketowns with a nearly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. In a sense, the Industrial Revolution would have never happened if two distinct forms of energy had not been separated from the earth: coal and commoners.
The dramatic increase of people available to populate the new urban spaces of the Industrial Age may have had one other cause: tea. The population growth during the first half of the eighteenth century neatly coincided with the mass adoption of tea as the de facto national beverage. (Imports grew from six tons at the beginning of the century to eleven thousand at the end.) A luxury good at the start of the century, tea had become a staple even of working-class diets by the 1850s.

…

London Labour and the London Poor. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Mekalanos, J. J., E. J. Rubin, and M. K. Waldor. “Cholera: Molecular Basis for Emergence and Pathogenesis.” FEMS Immunol. Med. Microbiol. 18 (1997): 241–48.
Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961.
Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Nightingale, Florence. Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1992.
Owen, David. “Green Manhattan.” The New Yorker, October 18, 2004.
Paneth, Nigel. “Assessing the Contributions of John Snow to Epidemiology: 150 Years After Removal of the Broad Street Pump Handle.” Epidemiology 15 (2004): 514–16.
Picard, Liza. Victorian London: The Life of a City, 1840–1870.

But many activists,
Follett included, treated these problematic developments as an opportu­
nity to revitalize American democracy from below. New to the post-Civil
War industrial city was a growing spatial separation of work from the
home, and this gave rise to a new configuration of city space, which now
combined a set of predominantly industrial or commercial zones with
a patchwork of specifically residential neighborhoods. Whether through
settlement houses, community centers, or neighborhood organizations, the
new urban residential space became a locus of intense grassroots politi­
cal activism. “We can never reform American politics from above,. . . by
charters and schemes of government,” Follett warned:
Political progress must be by local communities. Our municipal
life will be just as strong as the strength of its parts. We shall
never know how to be one of a nation until we are one of a
neighborhood. . . .

The development of canals and railroads meant that shipping goods inland from the Eastern seaboard ports, which had been almost impossible in the eighteenth century, now took less than a week.6 Americans could communicate with unprecedented ease due to the development of the telegraph and the steam-powered printing press.7 The rate of growth of gross domestic product per capita doubled from 0.5 percent per year to almost 1 percent per year. At the same time, the concentration of populations in new urban areas presented problems of crowding, disease, lack of clean water, and lack of sanitation.8
The demand for, and possibility of producing, ever more cotton with slave labor led to the physical expansion of the United States. It also led to the increasing significance of the United States in the share of the world’s cotton production. From 1791 to 1851, the cotton production of the United States expanded from 469 million bales to 2.5 billion bales, and from less than 1 percent of the world production of that staple to 67 percent.

…

But he chalked these up to the pernicious impact of poverty and racism; “If all the laws were framed to provide equal opportunity, a majority of the Negroes would not be able to take full advantage of the change. There would still be a vast, silent, and automatic system directed against men and women of color,” he wrote.33
Not everyone agreed that the causes of African American poverty were environmental rather than internal. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) sparked a debate about the social pathologies of the new “urban underclass.” The report, which at least in part blamed female-led families, single mothers, and welfare dependency for black urban poverty, produced an uproar because it was viewed as both patronizing and incorrect. Moynihan hoped that following his prescriptions would lead to a greater focus on providing jobs for African American men and increase the number of families with two parents, but his ideas were lost in the controversy over affixing blame.34
WAR ON POVERTY
The discourse on inequality in the 1960s coincided with, and encouraged, major government efforts to counter its effects.

On the queen’s health, safety, and reproductive capacity the continued existence of the hive does in fact depend. Here and only here, does one find such organized collective aggression by a specialized military force as one finds first in the ancient cities.” Mumford, 1961, 46.
This constitutes one: Information about the history of Manchester from Marcus, 5–6.
“From this foul”: Quoted in Marcus, 15. “Considering this new urban area on its lowest physical terms, without reference to its social facilities or its culture, it is plain that never before in recorded history had such vast masses of people lived in such a savagely deteriorated environment, ugly in form, debased in content. The galley slaves of the Orient, the wretched prisoners in the Athenian silver mines, the depressed proletariat in the insulae of Rome—these classes had known, no doubt, a comparable foulness; but never before had human blight so universally been accepted as normal: normal and inevitable.”

…

The Language of Genes: Solving the Mysteries of Our Genetic Past, Present and Future. New York and London: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1993.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1986.
Karsai, Istvan, and John W. Wenzel. “Productivity, individual-level and colony-level flexibility, and organization of work as consequences of colony size.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 95 (1998): 8665–69.
Katz, Peter. The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994.
Kelso, J. A. Scott. Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior.

pages: 313words: 100,317

Berlin Now: The City After the Wall
by
Peter Schneider,
Sophie Schlondorff

The sale, which was made at a time when hardly anyone believed in an imminent end to the divided state of Germany, let alone in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was a bold—a prophetic—investment. Indeed, it was driven more by a political vision than by commercial interests. Edzard Reuter, who was the son of West Berlin’s legendary first mayor, Ernst Reuter, wanted to build not only a new Daimler headquarters here but a whole new urban area, which would—at some distant point in the future—be connected to East Berlin. Rarely has the CEO of a major group been so right about a decision that many of his business colleagues greeted with smirks. Reuter himself was surprised by how quickly his bet paid off. The plot of land, which he bought for 93 million deutsche marks, is now one of the most valuable properties in Berlin.
As an unwelcome “dowry,” Reuter had also inherited Weinhaus Huth, which the city had just spent 3 million deutsche marks renovating.

…

Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Renaissance dreamer and statesman, experienced precisely such a magical moment. He gathered the best minds of his generation around him and, in just a few short decades, succeeded in establishing the incomparable Florence. To build a marvelous city like Florence, Piano said, you need a great deal of power, a great deal of money, but more than anything you need passion and a willingness to play hard.
What worried him was the incredible speed at which new urban entities arise. In his view, the constant and worldwide revolutionizing of construction materials, computer-programmed building techniques, and new transport routes had resulted in an unprecedented acceleration of construction processes and endless possibilities. This material revolution, Piano said, virtually precluded the biological growth of cities: “This is the first time in history that you can produce an entire urban area in five to ten years.

See http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sir-hugh-orde-water-cannon-make-for-good-headlines-ndash-and-bad-policing-2335676.html.
219. For an account of the violence, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2004/jun/16/euro2004.sport19. For a description and analysis of the faciliatory strategy, see O. Adang and C. Cuvelier, (2001) Op cit. (note 23).
220. D.O. Sears and J.B. McConahay, The Politics of Violence: The New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot (Boston, Mass: Houghton-Mifflin, 1973).
221. See D.O. Sears, (1994) Op cit (note 5)
222. See J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Penguin, 1963/1964).
Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Dedication page
Preface
Chapter 1: A Story Full of Sound and Fury
Chapter 2: Lessons from the History of Riots
Chapter 3: Understanding Urban Riots
Chapter 4: Four Days in August
Chapter 5: Conclusion
References

The ascendancy of the northeastern region of the United States ended in the second half of the twentieth century, as manufacturing centers like Pittsburgh and Detroit withered and as cities in other regions such as Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, and San Diego surged, becoming hubs of information technology, aerospace, the military, and leisure activities. By 1990 only four of the ten largest cities—and none of the fastest-growing ones—were located in the northeast.47
New York City remained the primary economic center of the nation, but decentralization brought new urban rivalries. Because New York comprised a decreasing share of the U.S. population and was remote from the fastest-growing regions of the country, its manufacturers and retailers were at a disadvantage in serving national markets. And while the damage to the New York City corporate headquarters complex slowed after the 1970s, the enlargement of southern and western cities offered corporations more alternatives to Manhattan for their home office sites.48
Great wealth became more broadly dispersed.

…

Social Register Association, Social Register, New York, 1949, (New York: Social Register Association, 1948).
93. N = 201. Ibid.
94. N = 338, HHEP.
95. This residential pattern of a new uptown neighborhood arising simultaneously with new suburbs was not unique to New York. In Pittsburgh in the 1880s and 1890s, some upper-class families moved from their old quarters downtown and in Allegheny City to new urban neighborhoods in the East End of the city that boasted large houses and mansions positioned closely together on rectilinear blocks. At the same time, others relocated to Sewickley, an upper-class railroad suburb. In Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, Buffalo, New Orleans, and Milwaukee, urban upper-class residential districts survived until at least the mid-twentieth century, even as elite suburbs sprouted on the outskirts.

He was arrested and jailed in Brescia, where he organized a mass breakout:260 political prisoners escaped. A pen-and-ink self-portrait in beard and glasses survives from his prison days. He was recaptured in September 1944, and died in Mauthausen in the last days of the war, a casualty of totalitarianism whose death was a lesson in the nature of courage to all of us, not least Albert Speer.
Leon Krier, the architect best known for his role in planning Seaside, the outpost of New Urbanism on the Florida panhandle, and the Prince of Wales’s village of Poundbury, has been the most active voice in attempting to rehabilitate Speer. Why, he wondered, was it considered necessary to destroy the inoffensive street lights that Hitler’s architect had designed for Berlin? Why, Krier asked, did Speer end up as Spandau’s penultimate prisoner? Long after Werner von Braun, who devised the highly destructive V2 rockets that were built using slave labour and which killed so many Londoners, had bypassed the prisoner-of-war camps and flown to the USA to build the arsenal of democracy, Speer was still in jail.

…

Mao’s Tiananmen was the most ubiquitous image of China, the icon by which the country was recognized all over the world. Not surprisingly, such a charged arena has also been used by those who have challenged the repression with which the Communists have maintained their hold on power. It has become the most contested of spaces, a representation of the authority of Mao and his successors, but also a reminder of the tragic massacre of 1989 and the events leading up to it. And it is now being supplanted as the new urban iconography of Beijing is manufactured with astonishing speed.
Before the Boxer Rebellion, the area in front of Tiananmen was the administrative centre of the imperial city. The emperor’s more distant kin lived in this buffer zone between the palace and the merchant city beyond, fringed by shops and narrow lanes, muddy underfoot, dotted with little groves of trees, and still enclosed by walls.

If there are no particularly unique features to hand, then hire some famous architect, like Frank Gehry, to build a signature building (like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao) to fill the gap.6 History, culture, uniqueness and authenticity are everywhere commodified and sold to tourists, prospective entrepreneurs and corporate heads alike, yielding monopoly rents to landed interests, property developers and speculators. The role of the class monopoly rent that is then gained from rising land values and property prices in cities like New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, London and Barcelona is hugely important for capital in general. The gentrification process that is then unleashed is, worldwide, a critical part of an economy based as much on accumulation through dispossession as on creating wealth through new urban investments.
In cultivating monopoly power, capital realises far-reaching control over production and marketing. It can stabilise the business environment to allow for rational calculation and long-term planning, the reduction of risk and uncertainty. The ‘visible hand’ of the corporation, as Alfred Chandler terms it, has been and continues to be just as important to capitalist history as Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’.7 The ‘heavy hand’ of state power exercised broadly in support of capital also plays its part.

…

Dispossession and destruction, displacement and construction become vehicles for vigorous and speculative capital accumulation as the figures of the financier and the rentier, the developer, the landed proprietor and the entrepreneurial mayor step from the shadows into the forefront of capital’s logic of accumulation. The economic engine that is capital circulation and accumulation gobbles up whole cities only to spit out new urban forms in spite of the resistance of people who feel alienated entirely from the processes that not only reshape the environments in which they live but also redefine the kind of person they must become in order to survive. Processes of social reproduction get re-engineered by capital from without. Everyday life is perverted to the circulation of capital. The coalition of the unwilling in relation to this forced redefinition of human nature constitutes a pool of alienated individuals that periodically erupts in riots and potentially revolutionary movements from Cairo to Istanbul, from Buenos Aires to São Paulo, and from Stockholm to El Alto.

But by 1960, there were 141, and today world urban population is rocketing upward at a rate
of 6.5 percent per year, according to Edgar de Vries and J. P. Thysse of the Institute of Social
Science in The Hague. This single stark statistic means a doubling of the earth's urban
population within eleven years.
One way to grasp the meaning of change on so phenomenal a scale is to imagine what
would happen if all existing cities, instead of expanding, retained their present size. If this
were so, in order to accommodate the new urban millions we would have to build a duplicate
city for each of the hundreds that already dot the globe. A new Tokyo, a new Hamburg, a
new Rome and Rangoon—and all within eleven years. (This explains why French urban
planners are sketching subterranean cities—stores, museums, warehouses and factories to be
built under the earth, and why a Japanese architect has blueprinted a city to be built on stilts
out over the ocean.)

…

Because
societies in the past had been spatially and locally structured, and because urban societies
used to be exclusively city-based, we seem still to assume that territoriality is a necessary
attribute of social systems." This, he argues, leads us to wholly misunderstand such urban
problems as drug addiction, race riots, mental illness, poverty, etc. See his provocative essay,
"The Post-City Age" in Daedalus, Fall, 1968, pp. 1091-1110.
93
Average residence duration is taken from "New Urban Structures" by David Lewis in [131],
p. 313.
CHAPTER SIX
96
References to Weber, Simmel and Wirth are from [239], pp. 70-71.
98
Cox on limited involvements: [217], pp. 41-46.
102
On the number of people who preceded us, see "How Many People Have Lived on Earth?" by
Nathan Keyfitz in Demography, 1966, vol 3, #2, p. 581.
104
Integrator concept and Gutman quote from "Population Mobility in the American Middle
Class" by Robert Gutman in [241], pp. 175-182.
106
Crestwood Heights material is from [236], p. 365.
107
Barth quote from [216], pp. 13-14.
109
Fortune survey in [84], pp. 136-155.
110
I am indebted to Marvin Adelson, formerly Principal Scientist, System Development Corp.,
for the idea of occupational trajectories.
110
The quote from Rice is from "An Examination of the Boundaries of Part-Institutions" by A.

Motordom, however, had effective rhetorical weapons, growing
national organization, a favorable political climate, substantial wealth, and
the sympathy of a growing minority of city motorists. By 1930, with these
assets, motordom had redefined the city street.
In the new model, some users of once unquestioned legitimacy (notably
pedestrians) were restricted. Traffic engineers no longer burdened motorists
with the responsibility for congestion; their goal now was to ease the flow
of motor vehicles, either by restricting other users or by rebuilding city
thoroughfares for cars. New urban roads were treated as consumer commodities bought and paid for by their users and to be supplied as demanded.
On this basis, over the following four decades, the city was transformed to
accommodate automobiles.
Overview
The book is divided into three parts, named for the perspectives or technological frames of leading social groups. Perspectives on safety and legitimate access to the streets are featured in part I.

…

These routes were almost exclusively rural in 1920, but as the
new highway funds poured in, counties and states began to extend them
into and through cities. Beginning in the late 1920s and at an accelerating
pace thereafter, counties and states turned to highway engineers to solve
city traffic problems. Highway engineers brought highways into the cities,
reducing the role of city traffic control engineers in the congestion problem.
The new urban thoroughfares were largely bought and paid for by motorists with gasoline tax money.
State and local governments were quick to recognize revenue possibilities
in the growing number of motorists. License and registration fees were
universal by 1913.111 Motorists and their auto clubs resisted. Through the
early 1920s, most auto interests fought for low fees, for the use of general
revenues supplemented by federal aid in state highway projects, and for
the use of bond issues and special assessments of property holders to pay
for city streets and county roads.

As the hub for several of Saudi Arabia’s new city developments, Jeddah is emerging as the country’s Red Sea capital. From its humble origins as an ancient fishing village and entrepôt for trading tortoise shells, spices, and frankincense, Jeddah was anointed the gateway to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the seventh century. Over time, this mellow seaside oasis has become a bustling city of over five million residents and the hub for an archipelago of new urban developments stretching hundreds of kilometers. The city’s modern and moderate commercial class, like the maritime city itself, is intrinsically open to the world.
The business of religion is also providing a major boost to the Jeddah region. Driving east, I witnessed a construction bonanza aimed at creating jobs, diversifying the economy, and managing the twelve million and growing annual visitors to Mecca and Medina each year, one-quarter of whom come for hajj.

…

Warm thanks to Avner de-Shalit and participants in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem workshop on the “spirit of cities”: Jeremy Adelman, Gilles Campagnolo, Kateri Carmola, and Susan Clarke.
From Tianjin Eco-city to Guangzhou Knowledge City, thank you to the many dozens of officials who have hosted me at “smart cities” and special economic zones in China. I am similarly grateful to the managers of many other new urban developments on all continents for sharing their ambitious plans with me. Your projects are not yet on the map but surely will be thanks to your tireless efforts. Thanks also to Tony Reynard and Lincoln Ng of the Singapore Freeport for an insightful tour and conversation. At the Barcelona Smart City Expo 2014, I’d like to thank Ugo Valenti, Álvaro Nicolás, and Folc Lecha Mora. I appreciate learning about the inner workings of the City of London and its global strategy from Mark Boleat, Giles French, Anita Nandi, and Andrew Naylor.

pages: 578words: 141,373

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
by
John Grindrod

After the police had left Park Hill with their forensics evidence and crime-scene tape, I wandered around the top end of the estate, the part that was mostly still occupied. There were window boxes. Two women of a certain age were leaning on the balustrade of a ground floor flat, having a classic over-the-garden-fence gossip. At this end of the estate, people had gone to great lengths to personalise their flats, with shiny new paint, satellite dishes and creepers growing up trellises. It was hard to see how this could be done in the gaudy new Urban Splash zone.
As the evening sun hit the façade, the whole of Park Hill, refurbished, derelict or inhabited, turned a warm gold. The colours on the renovated section glowed like a bank of LCD screens, and from the city centre the estate blazed bright on the hilltop, rising above the city like a man-made Vesuvius. In its scale and ambition, Park Hill seems less a run-of-the-mill housing estate than an experiment with nature.

…

The Hook team’s criticisms were forgotten when a delegation from the American Institute of Architects visited Cumbernauld in 1967 as they scoped out potential entries for the R. S. Reynolds Memorial Award for community architecture.
‘To our amazement we were on the shortlist with Stockholm and Tapiola,’ said Ken, his delight still plain to see for all his efforts to conceal it, ‘and we then won!’ The award was announced in Washington on 10 May 1967, the Financial Times reporting that the jury chose it as ‘the western world’s highest achievement in new urban design for modern human needs’. A month later at the award ceremony in Scotland, Richard Reynolds, whose metals business sponsored the prize, claimed that ‘Cumbernauld has set the standard for the world … some of the most expensive buildings in the history of architecture have been the ugliest. In Cumbernauld you have, to your credit, combined outstanding design with reasonable cost.’21 It was the biggest international prize given to any of the new towns.

To understand this, one must understand that the underlying characteristic of the Spanish tradition, from dictatorship to democracy, was one of forgetting—wiping out the past and ignoring the responsibility of Francoism…. This programmed amnesia was similarly applied to urbanism…. The aim being to erase the city's working class memory, by demolishing popular and cooperative centers, old social housing and factories…and the total absence of any sustainability objectives…. In no building project…were any ecological criteria or sustainability standards implemented.9
Barcelona's new urban zones were redeveloped with improved public services and, in some cases, direct access to the sea. These parts of the city became gentrified, and hand in hand with gentrification came higher prices. Higher prices meant that lower-income people had to relocate, and, more generally, plans for public housing were underfulfilled.10 One study noted the following impacts:
—Strong increases in the prices of housing for rent and for sale (from 1986 to 1993 the cumulative increase was 139% for home sale prices and nearly 145% in home rentals)
—A drastic decrease in the availability of public housing (from 1986 to 1992 there was a cumulative decrease of 5.9%)
—A gradual decrease in the availability of private houses for rent (from 1981 to 1991 the cumulative decrease was 23.7%)11
Thus, like the experience with mega-events elsewhere, hosting the games in Barcelona was accompanied by a redistribution of living standards to the detriment of lower-income groups.12
Finally, it is noteworthy that Barcelona made a major investment to host the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures.

Inspired by these groups we imagined a group of people take their fate into their own hands and begin building devices that function as external digestive systems. They use synthetic biology to create microbial stomach bacteria and mechanical devices to maximize the nutritional value of the urban environment, making up for any shortcomings in the increasingly limited diet available commercially. These people are the new urban foragers.
When developing the objects we explored a range of points of access into the scenario for different people: from a near-future fermenting container worn around the neck to a more extreme prosthetic device that suggested possible transhumanist values. We avoided hyper-realism in the design of the objects and the photography. It was very important that they clearly signaled their unreality so that viewers were aware they were looking at ideas, not products.

If successful, it will contribute positively to two key elements of the new macro-economic growth model by creating a new pool of labor for the services sector and stimulating consumer spending.
China’s urbanization has been a steady process since the reform era began in 1978 (Figure 3.7). At that time only 18 percent (172 million people) lived in urban areas—today slightly more than half of the national population (54 percent or 731 million) are categorized as urban. This steady increase was the result of three processes: rural-to-urban migration; massive building of new urban infrastructure; and rezoning (physically expanding the boundaries) of cities.
Figure 3.7 China’s Urbanization Growth
Source: Australian Treasury Department.
The three main drivers of urbanization in the future, according to Premier Li Keqiang, will be to give urban residency (hukou) to 100 million migrants who currently live in cities (an amnesty, in effect); rebuilding dilapidated parts of existing urban areas, where an additional 100 million currently live; and urbanizing an additional 100 million in the central and western regions of the country.32 This “300 million initiative” will account for the additional 16 percent due to become urban dwellers between now and 2030.

Selling gin was made illegal; women sold from bottles hidden beneath their skirts, and some entrepreneurial types created the “puss and mew,” a cabinet set on the streets where a customer could approach and, if they knew the password, hand their money to the vendor hidden inside and receive a dram of gin in return.
What made the craze subside wasn’t any set of laws. Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when it fact it was a reaction to the real problem—dramatic social change and the inability of older civic models to adapt. What helped the Gin Craze subside was the restructuring of society around the new urban realities created by London’s incredible social density, a restructuring that turned London into what we’d recognize as a modern city, one of the first. Many of the institutions we mean when we talk about “the industrialized world” actually arose in response to the social climate created by industrialization, rather than to industrialization itself. Mutual aid societies provided shared management of risk outside the traditional ties of kin and church.

But by the time of the Victorians, insects were avidly collected. Specialist groups sprung up, most notably the Entomological Society of London, of which Charles Darwin was a lifelong member. During the summer months, working-class men would find rare species and sell them to enthusiasts. The natural history writer David Elliston has suggested this rise in interest was perhaps a symbol of the new urban middle classes’ need for nature; trapped in their new towns and cities, these fledgling city dwellers needed a memory of freedom and flight.
Writers on bees tended to divide into those who were absorbed by the science and those who were commercial beekeepers, who were often down-to-earth people making a living in a rural economy. Both sides had much to learn from each other in this age of improvement: beekeepers found applications for the scientific theories; and those exploring the science—frequently clergymen—were beekeepers themselves and therefore practical in bent, if not explicitly commercial.

Thus Nagasaki was not so much a closed door as a narrow gateway and a listening post where the bakufu collected information from visiting ships (whose captains were required to write ‘news reports’ for transmission to Edo) and through which it imported books. ‘Dutch knowledge’ percolated slowly among the samurai, teachers and savants.
The regime of political seclusion did not mean economic stagnation. Japanese economic growth after 1600 was driven by a remarkable double revolution. Firstly, the political system created a large new urban economy as daimyo and samurai settled in castle towns. The most spectacular case was Edo itself. The sankin kotai rules brought to Edo hundreds of daimyo and their families and vast retinues of samurai.116 By 1700 half of Edo’s 1 million people were samurai retainers living in the great clan compounds that made up nearly three-quarters of the city area. Together the daimyo and the samurai formed a huge concentration of elite consumption for the services and manufactures of the urban merchants, artisans and day-labourers.

…

Nasser stood forth as an Arab Napoleon. His prestige was matchless: he was the rais (boss). With its large middle class, its great cities and seaports, its literature and cinema, its journalists and teachers, Egypt was the symbol of Arab modernity. Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism (formally inscribed in Egypt’s newconstitution) chimed with a phase of sharp social change in most Middle Eastern states. To the new urban workers, the growing number of students, the expanding bureaucracy, the young officer class, it offered a political creed and a cultural programme. It promised an end to the Palestinian grievance, through the collective effort of a revitalized nation. Within less than two years of his triumph at Suez, Nasser drewSyria into political union, to form the United Arab Republic. The same year (1958) sawthe end of Hashemite rule in Iraq.

Bombay city, once called “Bombay the Beautiful,” an urban vision against the Arabian Sea, atrophied so rapidly postindependence that such a label is now unimaginable. The complicated layers of state administration made it especially difficult to manage such rapid urban growth. This administrative weakness had been in full view during India’s Partition, that intense, bloody amputation of the Indian subcontinent which saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands from the northwest into India. While this mass migration led to the creation of new urban spaces that resettled these people—such as Faridabad, Kalyani and Nilokheri—the bureaucracy impeded the growth of these cities, throttling any strategy for planned growth with its “everything in triplicate” sentiment and its snail-like pace.
L. C. Jain, former member of the planning commission who participated in the building of Faridabad, tells me, “We had angry refugees, trigger-happy Pathans, and chaos at the government level.

…

To figure out if our urban policies have changed in recent years, I meet Ramesh Ramanathan, the other half of Janagraaha’s leadership, over coffee one sunny afternoon in Bangalore. I reach late for our meeting thanks to traffic, but there could not be a more understanding audience for my apologies. Ramesh is in his forties, and his boyish smile under a head of silver hair is both incongruous and charming. I ask him about the possibilities of a new urban vision and he says, “We are making progress in the typical Indian way—two steps forward, one step back.”
India’s urban transformation, as Ramesh points out, had begun with the policies of Rajiv Gandhi’s government. Rajiv represented a dynamic shift for Indian policy on a number of fronts, and one of them was his attempt to give cities in independent India a measure of power. With his Nagarpalika bill, Rajiv pushed for the empowerment of local bodies both in the cities and in the villages.

In short, explains Davis, the population trends have us on the pathway to, as one of his books is entitled, a Planet of Slums.
These “megaslums” house literally millions of young, urban poor, where the losers of globalization and the new warriors are concentrated together in shanties and high-rises. Adding fuel to the fire are “the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.” These range from Hindu fundamentalism in the slums of Mumbai, Islamist movements in Casablanca, Pentecostalists in San Salvador, and revolutionary populists in Caracas. These megaslums, really just “stinking mountains of shit,” are “volcanoes waiting to erupt.”
Cities are the new hotspots for conflict. Sometimes this violence may have a crossover with crime, but the outcome is often the same.

…

Imagine the video game Sim City crossed with Google Earth. It would give soldiers the ability to zoom into any neighborhood or even individual structure to see what is going on in real time. According to one report, “You have continuous coverage, around corners and through walls. You would never, for example, lose those mortar bombers who got out of their car and ran away.”
By sending in robots that navigate the new urban battlefield, DARPA is hoping to completely rewrite the script of Black Hawk Down. According to DARPA’s director, Dr. Anthony J. Tether, it will give U.S. forces “unprecedented awareness that enables them to shape and control [a] conflict as it unfolds.”
Some, though, doubt that it will work out the way the military hopes. Peters, for instance, thinks robots have their role, and that the urban warfare trends will drive their use, but we should not expect too much.

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Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by
Geoffrey West

Both seemed unbounded in their imaginative visions and were willing to embrace the fantasy of organic structures as witnessed by Gaudí’s magnum opus, the extraordinary Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, or Goff’s Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma, inspired by the famous Fibonacci sequence of numbers manifested in nautilus shells, sunflowers, and spiral galaxies.
All of these innovative examples are of individual structures, but there is no real equivalent in the design of entire cities, nor in urban development beyond variations on the garden city theme. However, in the 1980s a movement called the New Urbanism arose that was an attempt to combat some of the issues inherent in an automobile and steel and concrete–dominated society where people become alienated from one another and where commuting long distances to work becomes the norm. The movement advocated a return to diverse, mixed-use neighborhoods architecturally as well as socially and commercially, with an emphasis on community structure through designs that enhanced pedestrian use and public transportation.

Intimate authority isn’t mainly about writing down formal codes and laws; it is about setting up patterns, instilling habits, and creating contexts so that people are most likely to exercise individual responsibility. It means setting up welcome wagons so that new people feel part of an interdependent community. It means volunteering at the youth center so teenagers will have a place to go and be minded. It can be as trivial as the penny jar near the cash register so that the next person will have a penny handy if it’s needed. Or it can be as pervasive as residential projects along the lines of the New Urbanism movement, which are designed to make sure there are eyes on the street, people watching out for each other and subtly upholding community standards of behavior and decency.
In true reconciling fashion, intimate authority is a Third Way between excessive individualism on the one hand and imposed formal authority on the other. This is not authority as physics—one powerful body exerting pressure on a smaller body.

New York: William Morrow & Company, 1992.
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.
Fernald, Anya; Serena Milano; and Piero Sardo, eds. A World of Presidia: Food, Culture, and Community. Bra, Italy: Slow Food Editore, 2004.
Gibbons, Euell. Stalking the Wild Asparagus: Field Guide Edition. New York: David Mackey, 1970.
Hough, Michael. City Form and Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular. London: Routledge, 1984.
Johnson, Marilynn. The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Lawson, Laura. City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
MacDonald, Betty. The Egg and I. New York: Harper & Row, 1945.
Pellegrini, Angelo. The Unprejudiced Palate: Classic Thoughts on Food and the Good Life.

The commentary on the different views on fairness and luck in Europe and the United States draws from Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, “Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics,” NBER Working Paper, March 2005; and World Values Survey, 2005-2008 wave (http://www.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSAnalizeStudy.jsp, accessed 08/09/2010). The discussion on racial diversity and support for redistributive policies draws from William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 202. Data on tipping patterns in the United States come from Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler, “Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking: Entitlements in the Market,” American Economic Review, Vol. 76, September 1986, pp. 728-741; and Michael Lynn, “Tipping in Restaurants and Around the Globe: An Interdisciplinary Review,” in Morris Altman, ed., Handbook of Contemporary Behavioral Economics, Foundations and Developments (Armonk, N.Y.: M .E.

CHAPTER 11: WHAT CAN BE DONE TO CONTROL THE FRINGE ECONOMY?
1 John P. Caskey, Lower Income American, Higher Cost Financial Services (Madison, WI: Filene Research Institute, 1997).
2 Industry Pages, “Check Cashing—Federally Regulated, State Regulated or Unregulated?” April 24, 2003, www.industrypages.com/clmman/publish/article_33.shtml.235
3 For a fuller discussion of poverty see William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1997); Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game (New York: Vintage, 2000); Thomas Shapiro and Edward Wolff, Assets for the Poor: The Benefits of Spreading Asset Ownership (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2001); David Shipler, The Working Poor (New York: Vintage, 2005); and Matthew Lee, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

In 1815, as the Industrial Revolution peaked, British landowners (the old money) enacted the Corn Laws to block the transfer of power to the new middle classes by taxing industrialization. The historian David Cody writes, "After a lengthy campaign, opponents of the law finally got their way in 1846 -- a significant triumph which was indicative of the new political power of the English middle class." By 1850, the Industrial Revolution was over and across Europe, power shifted away from landowners and towards the new urban middle classes.
In the early twenty-first century, the upper classes are business and political elites who accumulated their wealth and power over the last fifty years. The middle classes are all those who "got connected," soon to be most of world's population, and the lower classes are the shrinking few who cannot yet get on line. We will, over the next decades, see similar attempts by this generation of old money to throttle the growing power of this global digital middle class.

It is easier to lay pipe networks because the distances are less daunting, and people generally have enough money to pay for them. Sanitation is a central feature of the concept of the city, at least since the days of the nineteenth century when the medieval, chaotic urban environment was tamed by sanitarians and engineers, and the city came to be defined as a living environment that successfully separates humans from their waste. Historians refer to this new urban template as “the sanitarian city,” or, if they’re more engineering-minded, the hydraulic city. Even the engineers don’t call it the brick or road city, because it was sanitary infrastructure that was the mark of successful urban living. It made successful urban living possible.
Slums defy this logic. They defeat urban planners. They are so shifting, changing, and chaotic that experts don’t even dare give them a firm definition.

This challenges much conventional wisdom, however. It suggests that rural depopulation should not necessarily be opposed with “sustainable development” schemes aimed at improving rural life to stop people migrating to cities. Equally, instead of encouraging low-tech traditional farming methods it may be preferable to focus on improving high-yield mechanized agriculture on the most fertile farmland to feed the new urban residents, while allowing mountainsides and other marginal lands to revert to forest. This is already happening by default in Latin America and elsewhere: In Vietnam, forest area has been increasing since the 1990s after small-scale, unproductive agriculture was made uncompetitive by more intensive, larger-scale farming in the more open market economy. The environment has benefited as extensive areas were abandoned by people moving to take up jobs in the expanding cities.69
This trend should be cause for optimism that we can make progress in meeting the biodiversity planetary boundary.

Sarah O’Connor, “Amazon Unpacked,” Financial Times, February 8, 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html#slide0.
9. Don Peck, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” The Atlantic, March 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform-america/307919/?single_page=true.
10. Jim Clifton, The Coming Jobs War (New York: Gallup Press, 2011).
11. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage, 1997).
12. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2013, repr.).
13. Murray argues that harmful changes in values are the most important explanatory factor. As he writes, “The deterioration of social capital in lower-class white America strips the people who live there of one of the main resources through which Americans have pursued happiness.

What was the physical path in there? And what might that tell me about how everything else connected? What was the reductio ad absurdum of the tubes?
The Internet was a human construction, its tendrils spreading around the world. How was all that stuff shoehorned into what was out there already? Did it seep under buildings or along “telephone” poles? Did it take over old abandoned warehouses or form new urban neighborhoods? I didn’t want a PhD in electrical engineering, but I hoped what was going on inside the black box and along the yellow wires could be ever so slightly, well, illuminated. Hankins was perpetually on the road and couldn’t stop. But he had a guy in San Jose who could tell me something about the power of light.
Brocade’s headquarters was in a mirror-windowed building in the shadow of the San Jose airport, in Silicon Valley.

One of the most outrageous is Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. With its handprint-studded forecourt and lurid oriental decor, it’s an opium den of the masses. Cinema’s theatrical drag act was popular in Germany too, albeit not with everyone. Siegfried Kracauer, a well known journalist who had trained as an architect (and was a childhood friend of Adorno’s), frequently wrote on the topic of popular entertainment, which he thought distracted the new urban classes from Germany’s febrile political situation, lulling them into a false sense of security. In a 1926 article entitled ‘Cult of Distraction’ Kracauer criticised the pretensions of cinemas to the fake unity of theatres – to the status of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Instead, he wanted cinemas to expose the cracks. ‘In the streets of Berlin,’ he wrote ominously, ‘one is not seldom struck by the momentary insight that one day all this will suddenly burst apart.

Ironically, perhaps, an invention designed to affirm the primacy and ubiquity of the sacred ended up becoming a tool for the expansion of the secular economy. Trade had been expanding for a century or two already, and keeping track of things numerically—as well as temporally—had become much more important. If the previous era was characterized by the calendar, this new clockwork universe would be characterized by the schedule.
The bells of the monastery became the bells of the new urban society. Trade, work, meals, and the market were all punctuated by the ringing of bells. In line with other highly centralizing Renaissance inventions such as currency and the corporation, bells were controlled by central authorities. This gave rise to distrust, as workers were never sure if their employers were measuring time fairly. The emergence of the clock tower gave everyone access to the same time, allowing for verification while also amplifying time’s authority.

In 1950, roughly one in twenty men: According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey, the employment-population ratio for men between twenty-five and fifty-four was 95.3 percent in 1950 and 81.4 percent in 2011.
When asked by The New York Times: Andrew Goldman, “Larry Summers, Un-king of Kumbaya,” The New York Times Magazine, May 12, 2011.
reveals the real McDowell County: Bill Bishop, The Big Sort (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 128.
Starting in the 1970s: William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996).
African-American boys whose fathers: Keith Finlay and David Neumark, “Is Marriage Always Good for Children? Evidence from Families Affected by Incarceration,” Journal of Human Resources 45, no. 4 (2010): 1046–1088.
the greatest gender gap in college graduation rates: Ralph Richard Banks, Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone (New York: Dutton, 2011).

If you think that’s bad, a 727 once suffered an engine separation after ingesting a frozen chunk of its own leaked toilet waste, inspiring the line “when the shit hits the turbofan.”
At the end of a flight, the blue fluid, along with your contributions to it, are vacuumed into a tank on the back of a truck. (The truck driver’s job is even lousier than the copilot’s, but it pays better.) The driver then wheels around to the back of the airport and furtively offloads the waste in a ditch behind a parking lot.
In truth I don’t know what he does with it. Time to start a new urban legend.
Before boarding, we were told our flight was weight restricted because of a malfunctioning system. Whose decision is it to take off when something important isn’t working?
Airplanes can depart with inoperative components—usually nonessential equipment carried in duplicate or triplicate—only in accordance with guidelines laid out in two thick manuals called the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) and Configuration Deviation List (CDL).

Initially the reclaimed lands were turned into arable fields that were planted with bread cereals, resulting in a dramatic rise in grain production between 1000 and 1300; dairying in contrast continued to be practiced on a small scale in the salt-marsh regions as it had been in the past. The new peasant farms on reclaimed lands prospered, and the population of Holland grew steadily. Grain surpluses produced on the small farms supported the growth of new urban settlements including Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, the Hague, Delft, Rotterdam, and Gouda. At the same time, Holland’s strategic location on the North Sea and near the mouth of the Rhine River encouraged the development of maritime trade that brought new prosperity to the rising coastal towns and cities. The reclaimed Dutch countryside of the fourteenth century, oriented around cereal production to feed the growing domestic urban population, appeared to be poised for steady growth and prosperity.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a new kind of wonderland became imaginable, one that took the cosmopolitan ethos that had been growing for the preceding two centuries and turned it into a weekend attraction. The wellsprings that fed this new form were multiple: the new interest in nature as spectacle; the runaway popularity of Great Exhibitions, like the Crystal Palace of 1851, that showcased objects of wonder from around the world; the new urban parks being designed in New York and Paris and Boston; and the roving circuses of Barnum and Bailey. Many of these environments derived from conventions that had first been developed behind the fences of royal estates and other aristocratic properties: follies, gardens—nature sculpted and arranged for the amusement of an idle stroll or a carriage ride.
The public zoos that first appeared in European and American cities in the middle of the nineteenth century embodied these many influences: the newfound interest in experiencing nature; the global vistas of an imperial age; the private menageries of royal courts now opened to the public.

See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000);Robert K. Fullinwider, ed., Civil Society, Democracy, and Civic Renewal (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);and Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution/The Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).
[back]
10. This section on sprawl and new urbanism draws heavily from David Callahan and Stephen Heintz, eds., Quality of Life 2000: The New Politics of Work and Community (New York: Demos, 2002), 77–118. Relevant essays in the book include Robert Liberty, "Is the American Dream Endless Sprawl?"; Philip Langdon, "New Development, Traditional Patterns"; "Growth: New Challenges and Opportunities in a New American Landscape—An Interagency Report by the Clinton/Gore Administration"; and Ray Oldenburg, "Our Vanishing 'Third Places.'"

New York: Times Books.
Wilson, Kenneth L., and Alejandro Portes. 1980. “Immigration Enclaves: An Analysis of the Labor Market Experiences of Cubans in Miami.” American Journal of Sociology 86:295–319.
Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.
Chapter 5
Making the Grade
Education and Mobility
To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States.
—George W. Bush, Yale commencement address, thirty-three years after his graduation
According to the American Dream, education identifies and selects intelligent, talented, and motivated individuals and provides educational training in direct proportion to individual merit.

To worry about these consequences of extreme inequality has nothing to do with being envious of the rich and everything to do with the fear that rapidly growing top incomes are a threat to the wellbeing of everyone else.85
This issue just isn’t going to go away, and I would add that it is a problem not just for the Western world but for the emerging world too, perhaps especially for China, which had historically gone a long way towards abolishing inequality, at what must be admitted was a very high price, but has now taken a long stride towards prosperity, at the cost of greatly increasing inequality. The danger facing China comes from the fractures caused by that inequality. We already see rising tensions between this new urban workforce, the new Chinese middle class, and the rural poverty it’s leaving behind. In addition there is friction between the coast and the center, between the factories and the farms, and increasing problems with corruption and maladministration. All this matters for the rest of the world, because of China’s centrality to the world economy as a producer of so much and increasingly as a consumer too, especially of luxury goods.

At the same time, economies with low per capita incomes
and rising income inequality may be able to expand relatively easily
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When the Money Runs Out
if, for example, there is support for political reform to allow a faster
rate of economic growth. Think, for example, of China’s economic
success – thanks to reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping – since the
1980s. Even with high levels of income inequality, rapid growth can
keep Smith’s melancholy at bay.
Indeed, China’s success has been accompanied by a persistent rise
in income inequality. Fast-­developing economies typically go
through a period of rapidly rising inequality as the new urban ‘rich’
see their incomes fast outstripping those of the rural poor, thanks to
higher levels of productivity in manufacturing than in rural endeavours. Eventually, however, this process should go into reverse: a rapid
reduction in the number of people working on the land leads to an
increase in productivity for the remainder, allowing their incomes to
catch up with those available in the distant metropolis.

The choices they make can segregate us further or create new connections; the algorithms they devise can exclude voices or bring more people into the fold; the interfaces they invent can expand our sense of human possibility or limit it to the already familiar.
Online and off, the people who create social structures need to be aware of and sensitive to human difference. This difference is crucial to realizing the democratizing potential of technology. The range of voices and perspectives exposed must be expanded; cultural diversity and cultural democracy are intertwined.
In a powerful sense, programmers are the new urban planners, shaping the virtual frontier into the spaces we occupy, building the boxes into which we fit our lives, and carving out the routes we travel—which is why more of us need to learn to write code. What vision of a vibrant, thriving city informs their view? Is it a place that fosters chance encounters or somewhere that favors the predictable? Are the communities mixed or gated? Are they full of privately owned shopping malls and sponsored billboards or are there truly public squares?

They did not want to restore the
Communists to power (though in this case there probably were a few more exceptions), but they sought to hold onto
certain memories and experiences of life in the Communist state. A third group that wanted to wipe the square clean and
start anew might present itself as free from these longings, but others have imputed to it yet another nostalgia: for the
heroic architecture of the 1920s that claimed the ability to create a new urban world. The motivations on all sides
deserve more careful attention, which will help us better understand what is at stake in their polemics.
The palace mockup that stood during 1993 and 1994 probably marked the high point of the debate. The scaffolding
extended westward from the empty Palace of the Republic; a team of Parisian art students painted Schlüter's and
Eosander's facades on strips of canvas which were then mounted on the outside.

Pink, “The New Face of the Silicon Age,” Wired, February 2004. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india.html.
5 Nichole Gracely, “Being Homeless Is Better Than Working for Amazon,” The Guardian, 29 November 2014. www.theguardian.com/money/2014/nov/28/being-homeless-is-better-than-working-for-amazon.
6 John Lovering, “Creating Discourses Rather Than Jobs: The Crisis in the Cities and the Transition Fantasies of Intellectuals and Policy Makers,” in Patsy Healey (ed.), Managing Cities: The New Urban Context, John Wiley, 1995.
7 There are many different versions of this statement. The origins have been traced to a speech given by Martin Niemoller, the Lutheran pastor and victim of Nazi persecution, on 6 January 1946 to the representatives of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt.
8 Cited in Jason Tanz, “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other,” Wired, 23 April 2014. www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy.
9 William Alden, “The Business Tycoons of Airbnb,” The New York Times Magazine, 30 November 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/magazine/the-business-tycoons-of-airbnb.html.
10 Kevin Roose, “Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem?”

The population of 38 million puts it in a league not so much with other cities as with entire respectably sized countries—it is more populous than Iraq, for instance, bigger than Malaysia, bigger than Peru.
The arithmetic is relentless. Every day 800 babies are born in Chongqing and 500 people die—many of them from emphysema, since the air quality is so bad, or by their own hand, so firmly have the new urban phenomena of angst and anomie taken hold. Thirteen hundred of the rural poor stream into the city each day to try to grab for themselves some of the riches that are so clearly being generated within. Thus some 1,600 new people every day are added to the population—the equivalent of all the people of Luxembourg welding themselves onto the city every year.
To accommodate these numbers new skyscrapers are being flung up with furious abandon.

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The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by
Peter Temin

Securities Markets in the 1980s: The New Regime, 1979–1984. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House.
Williams, Timothy. 2016. “Number of Women in Jail Has Grown Far Faster than That of Men, Study Says.” New York Times, August 17.
Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.
Wilson, William Julius. 2009. More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York: Norton.
Wines, Michael. 2016a. “Federal Judge Bars North Dakota from Enforcing Restrictive Voter ID Law.” New York Times, August 1.
Wines, Michael. 2016b. “Inside the Conservative Push for States to Amend the Constitution.” New York Times, August 22.
Wines, Michael, and Lizette Alvarez. 2015.

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You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall
by
Colin Ellard

Collectively, this amalgam of activity and geometry continues to resonate in the present time, influencing our feelings and actions as we walk a city.
The origins of the psychogeographic enterprise take us into the fascinating but bewildering territory of mid-twentieth-century French artistic and intellectual movements. One early proponent of the idea that city spaces evoke feelings as surely as mixtures of chemicals produce drug effects was Ivan Chtcheglov. In his “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” Chtcheglov wrote that cities were inhabited by ghosts created by combinations of “shifting angles” and “receding perspectives” that “allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space.” Central to Chtcheglov’s methodology was the derive, a kind of unstructured wandering where one was led from place to place like a robot being carried along the streets by simple rules related to the appearance of space.

When they are not united, developers are able to exploit the fissures among government agencies to their advantage. Similarly, a foundation of trust between the public sector and private developer is essential to resolving the inevitable problems that crop up continually in the development of complex large-scale city-building projects. It is essential to success.
Ambition worked against an identity of interests at Ground Zero. Though complicated and protracted, the struggles did bring forth a new urban precinct. Aspirations for revitalization of the city’s historical business center had been on the forefront of city policymaking for decades. Ironically, it took tragedy and the opportunity it begat to transform the historic fundamentals of lower Manhattan. Power at Ground Zero chronicles the role of politics and money in rebuilding the Trade Center site after 9/11 and how the alliances, compromises, and personalities of those involved shaped the achievements (and disappointments) of this most significant challenge to the city of New York and the nation.

…

Eckstut had designed the well-regarded master plan for Battery Park City with Alex Cooper in his former firm. To reconstruct the underground, the PA needed to understand what was going to be built above on the site, and Eckstut was asked to develop a transportation and infrastructure master plan that would allow the PA to connect what it was doing below with what would happen above.
His agenda was to connect the two levels and make them seamless. The work was driven by the idea of creating a new urban district, a strong pedestrian public realm that related to the streets surrounding the site. A sequence of public spaces would connect transit on and adjacent to the site, the Winter Garden at Battery Park City, and a potential new commuter rail connection by way of concourses and arcades lined with retail shops. He developed a full-scale model of the site, above and below ground, which the Port Authority insisted would yield far more specific and detailed engineering plans than those of the LMDC teams, even though those teams were also working with extensive models of the underground as a necessary tool to plan the retail shops, bus depots to accommodate the crowds expected to visit the memorial, and transportation terminal the Port Authority demanded.30
Those who saw Eckstut’s plans reported that they resembled the rejected Beyer Blinder Bell schemes.

…

The transforming neighborhood was no longer Ground Zero, though the moniker for the Trade Center site would be hard to let go for many citizens and the media alike.
For so many years, political language served as a stand-in for substance. Rhetorical language in particular had become a form of political action throughout the stages of planning and in the troubled interlude of controversy and conflict before construction on the site transformed the sixteen acres into a new urban place populated with daily activity. Far from inactive, the interlude could only deliver promises and more promises but now it had ended. The interlude was over. Enough was in place so the future rebuild of the whole was foreseeable, even though several pieces of the master plan were yet to come, and even though what was delivered was not the exact vision that had been promised, and even though the full urban fabric of the place was still evolving and the security issues of this twice-targeted site had yet to be tested.

There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the poor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842. In the cholera epidemic of 1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.
These poor could not be counted on as political allies of the government. But they were there—like slaves, or Indians—invisible ordinarily, a menace if they rose. There were more solid citizens, however, who might give steady support to the system—better-paid workers, landowning farmers. Also, there was the new urban white-collar worker, born in the rising commerce of the time, described by Thomas Cochran and William Miller (The Age of Enterprise):
Dressed in drab alpaca, hunched over a high desk, this new worker credited and debited, indexed and filed, wrote and stamped invoices, acceptances, bills of lading, receipts. Adequately paid, he had some extra money and leisure time. He patronized sporting events and theaters, savings banks and insurance companies.

…

He planned a “Poor People’s Encampment” in Washington, this time not with the paternal approval of the President. And he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike of garbage workers in that city. There, standing on a balcony outside his hotel room, he was shot to death by an unseen marksman. The Poor People’s Encampment went on, and then it was broken up by police action, just as the World War I veterans’ Bonus Army of 1932 was dispersed.
The killing of King brought new urban outbreaks all over the country, in which thirty-nine people were killed, thirty-five of them black. Evidence was piling up that even with all of the civil rights laws now on the books, the courts would not protect blacks against violence and injustice:
In the 1967 riots in Detroit, three black teen-agers were killed in the Algiers Motel. Three Detroit policemen and a black private guard were tried for this triple murder.

The rest of Times Square, for all its seediness, was a functioning entertainment district. And so whatever was lost of Times Square in the process of development did not have to be sacrificed for the good of the neighborhood. Indeed, the angriest critics of the new Times Square felt that the very act of “developing” such a place was a profanation, a blow against urbanness itself. Writing in The New Yorker in 1991, Brendan Gill described Times Square as the heart of a new urban Disneyland. In place of “a gaudy, tawdry medley of theatres, restaurants, rehearsal halls, hotels,” and so on, Gill wrote, public officials and private developers had fostered “a cold-blooded corporate simulacrum of an amusement park, designed to contain millions of square feet of offices filled with tens of thousands of office drones.”
The Municipal Art Society’s simulation had persuaded Paul Goldberger that Times Square’s spirit of “contained chaos” would evaporate amid the office towers.

Almost evÂ�eryÂ�one who wants a job has one,” and the state was just a
bumbling, Â�risible tax collector.15 In this imagined homeland, rural white
virtue offered a hiding place from the twentieth century’s tempests of
creative destruction.
Throughout most of the preceding century, the Ozarks periÂ�odically
offered the same comfort to a nation deeply ambivalent about the modern incorporation of America. Urbanites dazed by sudden, unchecked
industrialization in the early 1900s often located the new urbanÂ€pathologies in the polyglot work force that staffed the factories and filled
theÂ€ tenements. The Ozarks presented a dramatic contrast. Northwest
Arkansas and Southern Missouri have historically been among the whitest places in the country—over 95 percent white as late as 1996. The
African-American proportion of the population in Wal-Â�Mart’s Benton
County has stayed under 1 percent since the close of the Civil War.16
Moreover, the oldest waves of American immigration predominated—
eighÂ�teenth-Â�century EnÂ�glish and Scotch-Â�Irish, pre–Civil War Germans.
10
OUR FATHERS’ AMER I CA
Like much of the South’s rural interior, the region remained virtually
untouched by the Southern and Eastern European immigration waves
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Catholics and
Jews who made up the industrial work force in the North.

For example, if you wanted to reverse their order you would type the following:
> cbind(bird, bird.extra)[ii,6:1]
Using cbind() is easier than the matrix() command because you retain the row and column names in the newly created matrix. It is possible to use the matrix() command, but you would then have to re-establish the names. In the following example a new matrix is created using the existing data and the new Urban data:
> matrix(c(bird, Urban), ncol = 6)[ii,] [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [1,] 4 0 6 0 0 1 [2,] 9 3 0 0 2 9 [3,] 19 3 5 0 2 8 [4,] 46 16 8 4 0 28 [5,] 47 10 40 2 2 11 [6,] 50 0 10 7 0 9
The sort index is applied to re-order the rows. You see that the names are lost; you can add them afterwards using the rownames() and colnames() commands or you might add the dimnames = instruction to the matrix() command much as you saw previously.

The division was "not to be distinguished by any of the old lines of doctrinal or denominational cleavage," Strong wrote in 1913. "Their difference is one of spirit, aim, point of view, comprehensiveness. The one is individualist; the other is social." The one staged revivals; the other sought to reform the world.*10
Walter Rauschenbusch was the most well-known proponent of the Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch pastored a church in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and from that vantage point in the new urban slum, he watched the modern industrial order rub raw against humanity. He was an optimist, believing in the "immense latent perfectibility of human nature."11 Perfection, however, required social intervention. Rauschenbusch wrote in 1908 that a "sense of equality is the basis for Christian morality." And to reach that equality, the Social Gospel theologian promoted legislation: a minimum wage, shorter workdays, better food, and cleaner air.

The mass movement toward cities has historically accompanied industrialization and economic development as more people were displaced from rural areas and sought their fortune in growing industries based in urban areas. These “Great Migrations” off the land are now being mirrored in major source countries of international migrants, like China, Mexico, and Turkey. About 1.3 billion people are still employed in agriculture, and over the next half-century, 500 million farmers are expected to abandon the countryside for cities.32 New urban residents may not intend to migrate overseas when they first move to the city, but the process of urbanization brings them closer to the networks, resources, income, and education that enable international mobility. Moving to a city, or living in one, markedly increases the propensity for people to migrate abroad.
The example of mobility in China helps to illustrate how urbanization and international migration help to reinforce each other.

The two most plausible pathways for the green-space effect on reducing the social gradient in mortality were reduction of stress and promotion of physical activity. Both are plausible and both may be playing a role.
Either way, making access to green space a priority for urban environments should be a priority. In Britain the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment estimates that if the budget for new road building were diverted, it could provide for 1,000 new urban parks at an initial capital cost of £10 million each. Creating 1,000 new parks would save around 74,000 tons of carbon from being emitted.39 Options are available that would create a greener and more health-equitable urban environment.
Active transport, usually travelling by bike or foot, but also including any form of transport that involves exercise, should be the complement to spending more on parks and less on roads.

Western observers, perhaps rightly, seem to fear it, linking it to the possibility of apocalyptic disease or massive civil unrest. Nigeria, writes Jeffrey Tayler in The Atlantic, “is lurching toward disaster.” Rapid urban growth, argues Mike Davis in Harper’s, “has been a recipe for the inevitable mass production of slums. Much of the urban world, as a result, is rushing backward to the age of Dickens.”
It could also be said that many of the people in the new urban world, driven by need but also by ambition, are fashioning inventive new ways to get by. Despite the congestion and chaos in Lagos, its pollution and absence of infrastructure (most neighborhoods lack running water, central sewage, and dependable electric power), many millions of people survive there. The hundreds and thousands who arrive each day evidently believe their prospects to be better there than in the places they left behind.

demanded Rabirius, getting to his feet. 'Where am I?'
Catulus gently pressed him down into his seat. 'Calm yourself, Gaius. We're your friends.'
'But no jury is going to find him guilty,' objected Cicero quietly. 'The poor fellow's clearly lost his brains.'
'Perduellio isn't heard before a jury. That's what's so cunning. It's heard before two judges, specially appointed for the purpose.'
'Appointed by whom?'
'Our new urban praetor, Lentulus Sura.'
Cicero grimaced at the name. Sura was a former consul, a man of great ambition and boundless stupidity, two qualities which in politics often go together.
'And whom has Old Sleepy-Head chosen as judges? Do we know?'
'Caesar is one. And Caesar is the other.'
'What?'
'Gaius Julius Caesar and his cousin Lucius are to be selected to hear the case.'
'Caesar is behind this?'

This difficult matter was referred to four different surveyors, who gave four different answers. The Thames watermen’s complaint was only a revised version of a centuries-old grievance. (The Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1767). Unfortunately, this riveting story was not followed up in subsequent issues, but I can say that the water-wheels stayed until 1822, and the Thames Water Authority is still liable under the 1582 grant. Rosemary Weinstein, ‘New urban demands in early modern London’, Medical History, Supplement no. 11, 1991.
30. Phillips, op. cit.
31. Entick, op. cit.
32. Pennant, op. cit.: in describing the building of Westminster Bridge he gave the figure as 22 feet. Discrepancies in figures can happen in even the most carefully researched works.
33. London Chronicle, 4 January 1763.
34. Weinstein, op. cit. The new river began to flow in 1609.
35.

Those
who settled British America, by contrast, were political participants
from the beginning with a self-interest in maintaining a democratic
political order.
Social cleavage lies at the root of Argentina’s weak rule of law.
The military coup in 1930, which represented the ﬁrst major break in
Argentina’s constitutional order, occurred because the country’s landed
oligarchy feared the rise of new urban middle and working classes. The
undermining of the rule of law started at the top as the Supreme Court
was made to retroactively endorse the legality of the coup. Suppression
of popular forces then paved the way for the rise of Peronism, which,
once in power, showed just as little respect for rules and laws as the
oligarchs it replaced. Class differences that were mitigated by political
inclusion in European countries like Britain and Sweden were exacerbated by the Argentine political system.

To migrate is to defeat the geographic, cultural and socio-economic distances that otherwise separate us from others. For migrants themselves, and for their sending and receiving societies, the impact is profound. Their journeys—whether from the country to the city (urbanization) or from home to abroad—are often heroic stories of courage in the face of great odds.
The last Renaissance bore witness to a marked increase in migrant flows, and so does the New.
Urbanization
In the pre-Columbus world, on average, only about 10 percent of Europe (with wide country-by-country variation) lived in towns of five thousand people or more. Trading nations like Italy topped the urbanization charts (15–16 percent); countries stuck on Europe’s margins (such as Spain, Portugal, the British Isles) scored in the low single digits.42 But with the new maps, the margins became gateways and their cities caught up quickly.

Quoted in Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 215.
42. “Exploitation” appears but twice in William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), when Wilson summarizes orthodox Marxist accounts, and again twice in Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996), when he describes blacks’ aversion to it. In Loïc Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), you can find four instances of “exploitation,” only one of which refers to the exploitation of the poor by the rich (page 123n7). The word makes a single appearance in Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), on page 176, in reference to sexual liaisons between inner-city residents; a single appearance in Sudhir Venkatesh’s American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), on page 150, in reference to housing project tenants being exploited by gangs; and a single appearance in Harrington’s The Other America (page 32).

In Worcester, social scientist Janet Madge discovered that large houses and gardens were not the only reason why many of the town’s salaried professionals chose to live outside the city’s boundaries; some did so because ‘they feel that it raises their status’.62 Far from recognizing that this desire for social distance posed a more pervasive threat to ‘community’ than working-class residents’ behaviour, policymakers simply pandered to it in their building plans.
In 1962 journalist Bill Rogers visited Kirkby, a new ‘urban district’ on Merseyside. He found ‘housewives’ blues’ and ‘bored and frustrated teenagers’. However determined and enthusiastic the new inhabitants might be, they could never entirely overcome the problems of the estates and new towns. Their out-of-town location meant that family and neighbourhood networks were broken up, with particularly severe consequences for women, who, as Bill Rogers suggested, could experience great isolation.

Since expansion of services—health care services, legal services, financial services—is usually a reliable sign of a country making a successful middle-income transition, current policies may actually be retarding the economy’s maturation.14
Patrick Chovanec, a business professor at Tsing Hua University in Beijing and a long-time China watcher, has become a leading voice in a growing chorus of analysts who are distinctly bearish on China’s near-term economic future. Chovanec suggests that the country’s response to the financial crash, while effective in the short term in maintaining employment, may have deepened the underlying problems. National banks vastly increased the supply of credit—by about 40 percent, Chovanec estimates—and much of it went into new urban apartment housing, vast swaths of which now stand empty.15
That may not be as bad as it sounds. Completed apartments in China typically contain few if any improvements like kitchen appliances, and there are no real estate taxes, so the cost of carrying vacant housing is lower than in most other countries. Private citizens have few opportunities to invest in appreciating capital assets, so the apartments may be intentionally held as a store of value.

There is another advantage: just as we grew food during my childhood to help the war against the evil of the Nazis, by growing our own food today we are fighting another kind of evil. We are beginning to stand up against the corporate/industrial agriculture giants that control so much of how our food is grown and distributed. It is a form of activism—doing our bit, along with the small family farms and organic farmers, to create an alternative to a system that is poisoning the world.
The New Urban Landscape—Food Gardens
Across the globe, from Russia to Argentina, from Cuba and Haiti to Tanzania, in almost every city, people are growing food. In some cases it is for pure pleasure, the joy of being connected to the land, of picking and eating a sun-ripened tomato, cooking your own runner beans. At other times it is for economic reasons. Or it may be because you are in need of spiritual healing.

This much was clear as long ago as 2007, when Apple dropped the “Computer” from their corporate name.17 The progress of the Stacks is lubricated by the fact that, as one sector after another is decomposed and reformulated around the production, analysis and interactive provision of data, a new market territory falls squarely into their core area of expertise. Information is the substance of the new mobility, as it is of the new healthcare, the new urbanism, the new warfare and so on, and this affords the enterprise that has mastered information-work a near-infinite series of pivots. No longer a vendor of hardware, nor merely a service provider, the Stack has become an indispensable intermediary in all the relations that together constitute everyday experience.
It’s not hard to perceive a certain deadening sameness that has begun to blanket the world under the sway of the Stacks, as the planet’s extraordinary diversity of lifeways yield to the unlimited perfect reproduction of the modes of taste, self-expression and subjectivity these new hegemons are tuned to.

The neoclassical Royal Opera House, featuring carved Union Jacks and a statue of Shakespeare on its pediment, offered increasingly diverse evening entertainments. Jazz bands played gigs at the Taj Mahal Hotel, often on an international circuit that included nightclub-crazed Shanghai. World-renowned touring artists, like the Petrograd ballerina Anna Pavlova, performed on Bombay’s stages.
The ultimate expression of the new Bombay cosmopolitanism was the cinema. In going out for a movie, Bombayites were not only participating in a new urban ritual but, through the films themselves, being exposed to places where they could not afford to travel and learning about cultures and social milieus they might never encounter in their real lives. In time, Bombay would come to produce films as heartily as it consumed them, eventually spawning the world’s largest film industry.
The roots of what became known as “Bollywood,” today’s film-mad, film-producing movie mecca, run deep.

The road from Shenzhen to Guangzhou (the provincial capital, known as Canton in colonial times) was sometimes made up, occasionally little more than a mud track. Although we were in the middle of the countryside, the road was overflowing with pedestrians and vehicles of every conceivable kind. Played out before my eyes was the most extraordinary juxtaposition of eras: women walking with their animals and carrying their produce, farmers riding bicycles and driving pedicabs, the new urban rich speeding by in black Mercedes and Lexuses, anonymous behind darkened windows, a constant stream of vans, pick-ups, lorries and minibuses, and in the fields by the side of the road peasants working their small paddy fields with water buffalo. It was as if two hundred of years of history had been condensed into one place in this single moment of time. It was a country in motion, its people living for the present, looking for and seizing the opportunity, as if it might never be offered again.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. ix.
7. We are thinking here primarily of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the political
articulated in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958).
8. For Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990),
pp. 221–263. For São Paulo, see Teresa Caldeira, ‘‘Fortiﬁed Enclaves:
The New Urban Segregation,’’ Public Culture, no. 8 (1996); 303–328.
9. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(New York: Zone Books, 1994).
10. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free
Press, 1992).
11. ‘‘We have watched the war machine . . . set its sights on a new type of
enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but ‘l’ennemi
quelconque’ [the whatever enemy].’’

Early
railway stations were often on the margins of towns, on low-value marshland, for
example, close to cattle markets, gas works, asylums, and gaols. As stations
penetrated further into the heart of cities, they became agents of slum clearance
(Kellett 1969). Some of the workers expelled from the slums were relocated to
new working class suburbs from which they commuted in special workmens’
trains. Municipal socialism, which began to flourish in the 1870s, gave an added
impetus to town improvement. New urban facilities which had previously been
promoted by individual Acts were increasingly promoted with the framework of
Local Government Acts, as statutory orders approved by Parliament. Towns and
cities extended their administrative boundaries, and often took the initiative for
promoting projects away from private enterprise. Many of these towns and cities
were controlled by business elites, who used their influence to extend the boundaries of their town and applied the local rates to investments in public facilities
which would improve the competitiveness of their town relative to its rivals.

Others reacted by clinging even more defiantly to their Shiite faith, the one source of identity that tended to survive the move from village to city more or less intact. If you needed advice on how to find your way in this topsy-turvy world, the local mosque was often the best place to look. Urbanization thus had the paradoxical effect of fueling a revival of traditional religion. One scholar has compared this dynamic in the shah’s Iran with England’s Industrial Revolution, when members of the new urban middle class reinvented religious practice by turning to John Wesley and his socially activist Methodist movement.3
Even those who directly benefited from the opportunities afforded by the shah’s modernization program could not escape the feeling of alienation. Farman Farmaian, a pioneering social worker who received her degree in the United States, understood perfectly well that her likelihood of receiving an education would have been almost zero had she been born just a few years earlier than she was.

In the first year after the war, the Cecils’ grand house in Arlington Street was sold, as were Devonshire House and Lord Dartmouth’s Mayfair mansion. No axes swung over the aristocrats, but the demolition balls were swinging through their homes. Dorchester House, Lansdowne House, Chesterfield House, Sunderland House and Brooke House would all go. In their place came entertainment venues and apartments: Mrs Meyrick’s nightclubs were catering for a new urban scene which was moving from private ballrooms and dining rooms to public spaces, open to anyone with enough cash and a clean shirt front. The leaders of Edwardian high society were clear that ‘society’ as they had understood it before the war, with its strict codes, interconnected family circles and prestige, had at last gone, smashed by war and tax. The pre-war Liberals had begun to mine through its ancient privilege and it was now less a grand edifice than a sponge, full of holes into which democratic culture was seeping.

In Sztálinváros, a glimpse of this appealing future finally became available in the summer of 1952, by which time the apartment blocks along May 1 Street were relatively orderly, the street itself was covered in asphalt, and the building debris and rubble had been carried away. The area had become a place where well-dressed people could go for a leisurely Sunday walk, and it soon became known as the “Switzerland of Sztálinváros.” This, in the words of the historian Sándor Horváth, was exactly what was supposed to happen. The new urban spaces would breed a new kind of worker, the “urban human”:
The “urban human” leads a sober life, visits the cinema and theater or listens to the radio instead of going to the pub, wears modern and comfortable ready-made clothing. He likes going for walks and loves to spend his spare time “sensibly” on the beach. In contrast to the villager he furnishes his apartment with urban furniture, preferring furniture from a factory to that designed by carpenters, and he lies on a practical sofa.

Raw bars serving oysters from the rich beds of Apalachicola Bay are everywhere, but foodies flock to Tamara’s Café Floridita for fresh seafood with a Latin twist. Outdoor tables are perched on a busy corner, perfect for people-watching. After you’ve had your fill, keep driving west, following coastal highways that move as slowly as molasses pours. Take a breather in almost too picturesque Seaside. This planned community, a 1980s laboratory for New Urbanism, may feel strangely like a movie set. That’s because it was – remember The Truman Show? Airstream trailers parked by the all-American town square sell everything from fresh-juice smoothies to grilled kabobs for picnicking at the beach.
* * *
Jutting into the Gulf of Mexico, windswept Cedar Key (www.cedarkey.org) is a charmingly unpretentious ensemble of ramshackle buildings, fishing boats and bird-inhabited bayous.

With an estimate of more than 40,000 stateless
migrant children in the country (Archavanitkul,
1998) and the 1.2 million migrant workers living
in Thailand, the country was not prepared to
integrate them into its society, despite the fact
that the world had become more or less borderless. Those people were marginalized in their
access to major social welfare (Chantavanich S,
Thailand
2003b.). Migrant workers became the new urban
poor disadvantaged group; local people came to
consider them undesirable. In the future, it may
turn out that neither Thailand nor migrants can
win from this partnership, unless Thailand
obtains wisdom in the regulation and protection
of these people.
References
Administrative Commission on Irregular Migrant
Workers (ACIRW). (2002). Statistical Data of
Irregular Migrant Workers Registration under the
Resolution of the Cabinet, 1996–2001.

Marx: The Principle of Infinite Accumulation
By the time Marx published the first volume of Capital in 1867, exactly one-half century after the publication of Ricardo’s Principles, economic and social realities had changed profoundly: the question was no longer whether farmers could feed a growing population or land prices would rise sky high but rather how to understand the dynamics of industrial capitalism, now in full blossom.
The most striking fact of the day was the misery of the industrial proletariat. Despite the growth of the economy, or perhaps in part because of it, and because, as well, of the vast rural exodus owing to both population growth and increasing agricultural productivity, workers crowded into urban slums. The working day was long, and wages were very low. A new urban misery emerged, more visible, more shocking, and in some respects even more extreme than the rural misery of the Old Regime. Germinal, Oliver Twist, and Les Misérables did not spring from the imaginations of their authors, any more than did laws limiting child labor in factories to children older than eight (in France in 1841) or ten in the mines (in Britain in 1842). Dr. Villermé’s Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures, published in France in 1840 (leading to the passage of a timid new child labor law in 1841), described the same sordid reality as The Condition of the Working Class in England, which Friedrich Engels published in 1845.4
In fact, all the historical data at our disposal today indicate that it was not until the second half—or even the final third—of the nineteenth century that a significant rise in the purchasing power of wages occurred.

It originated in the debates which occurred in the aftermath of the 1830 Revolution in France and the 1832 Reform Bill in Britain. The prominent participation of workers on the barricades in Paris in the three days which led to the abdication of Charles X, and in the Reform crisis in Britain, raised the question both of their continued subordinate constitutional status and of the new forms of poverty that afflicted them. In Germany, the discussion was further complicated by the difficulty of placing the new urban workers and rural migrants into the official categories of estate society. Sismondi in his New Principles of Political Economy of 1819 had introduced the term ‘proletariat’ to describe this novel phenomenon. Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right, had referred to this grouping as das Pöbel (the mob). Gans had originally accepted this terminology, but in the light of his visits both to France and to England adopted the term ‘proletariat’.

The only way you could tell you were leaving one community and entering another was when the franchises started repeating and you spotted another 7-Eleven, another Wendy's, another Costco, another Home Depot. The new landmarks were not office towers or monuments or city halls or libraries or museums but 7-Eleven stores. In giving directions, people would say, "You take the service road down past the 7-Eleven, and then ..." Mr. Wildrotsky loved it. It was right up his alley. 7-Eleven I He devoted an entire two weeks of the class to the study of this new urban phenomenon, 7-Eleven Land. Never before or since had Conrad ever felt so important.
As he stood there in a wretched little duet bathroom in Pittsburg, looking at himself in the mirror, he remembered the way Mr. Wildrotsky had finally done everything but get down on his knees and beg him
to apply to Berkeley. But by this time he was married, with a son, and another child was on the way—and all over again, as he surveyed his fabulous cut, ripped, six-pack build in the mirror, he ached over What Might Have Been.

The sound of Leeds, Betjeman remarked in a BBC film made in 1968, was that of ‘Victorian buildings crashing to the ground’. To the city fathers, however, they were welcome symbols of modernity. They even adopted the slogan ‘Leeds: Motorway City of the Seventies’, which was franked on all envelopes sent from the city to sum up its new identity as a place of ‘exciting flyovers and splendid roads’.12
For some observers, Britain’s new urban landscape was merely the outward symptom of deeper social and cultural changes that had radically altered the texture of life for millions of people. It was more than a question of washing the laundry in a machine instead of by hand, or of drinking Nescafé at breakfast instead of leaf tea, or of spending Sunday at a National Trust property instead of in church, or of going out for a curry instead of making shepherd’s pie, or even of going on holiday to Majorca rather than to Morecambe.

Johnson had wanted his commission to wax cautious concerning solutions—to take into account the limits posed by an unfriendly Congress and the constraints of a nation at war. He wanted them to blame outside agitators. He thought he had it wired: Chairman Otto Kerner, Illinois’s governor, was a creature of the Daley machine. What Johnson didn’t count on was Vice Chairman John Lindsay, who maneuvered himself as the Kerner Commission’s de facto chairman and saw to it the report demanded $30 billion in new urban spending—the very amount Martin Luther King had announced as the goal for his upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. Lindsay also, considering the draft report too cautious, had a young aide write an aggressive introduction and got the panel to adopt it almost verbatim. Its words were to become famous:
“This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal….

Leading off Scenic Hwy 30A are pristine, wild parklands like Grayton Beach State Park (www.floridastateparks.org/graytonbeach; 357 Main Park Rd, Santa Rosa Beach; car $5), considered one of Florida’s prettiest, most pristine strands. About 15 quaint communities hug the coast, some arty and funky, and some master-planned resorts with matchy-matchy architectural perfection. Of these, the most intriguing and surreal is the little village of Seaside (www.seasidefl.com), a Necco Wafer–colored town that was hailed as a model of New Urbanism in the 1980s.
Seaside is such an idealized vision that, unaltered, it formed the setting for the 1998 film The Truman Show, about a man whose ‘perfect life’ is nothing but a TV show. Other variations on this theme are WaterColor, Alys Beach and Rosemary Beach.
Good online resources are www.30a.com and www.visitsouthwalton.com.
Pensacola & Pensacola Beach
Neighbors with Alabama, Pensacola and its adjacent beach town welcome visitors driving in from the west.

But the phenomenon of ‘Cool Britannia’ was short-lived; by the millennium, most of Britpop’s big acts had self-­destructed. Damon Albarn later went on to create a new virtual band, Gorillaz, in partnership with cult cartoonist and illustrator Jamie Hewlett.
So where does that leave us in the noughties? In many ways, the era of MySpace, iTunes and file sharing has seen Britain’s music scene become more diverse and divided than ever. Jazz, soul, R&B and hip-hop beats have fused into a new ‘urban’ sound (summed up by artists like Jamelia, The Streets and Dizzee Rascal), while dance music continues to morph through new forms. On the pop side, singer-songwriters have made a comeback: Katie Mellua, Duffy and